Chrysalis with John Fiege

The tires of your car have a chemical in them, called 6PPD, that slows tire degradation by binding with oxygen and ozone that could break down the rubber. But these same reactions that protect the rubber are also creating a new chemical, called 6PPD-quinone, which scientists just found in 2020 to be highly toxic to aquatic organisms.

6PPD is in essentially every tire made since the 1960s, and aquatic ecosystems around the world, particularly in dense urban areas, are in danger.

Coho salmon is particularly susceptible to the toxin, and salmon populations in the Seattle area have been decimated by stormwater runoff containing the tiny particles that wear off tires as they speed down the road.

Now that the science is clear, the search is on to find a substitute for 6PPD; but for many years to come, the pollutants will continue to shed from our tires and into our waterways.

How to stop the stormwater from getting to the salmon and other aquatic organisms is one of the many ways that the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance is advocating for the ecological health of Puget Sound and other waterways in the Seattle area.

Sean Dixon leads these efforts as the executive director of the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, which is part of the worldwide network of waterkeepers.

I discuss with Sean the work he’s doing in Seattle but also the waterkeeper movement more broadly and the importance of organized, community-engaged action to protect waterways and the diverse ecosystems that depend on them across the planet.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Projects series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Sean Dixon

As Executive Director of Puget Soundkeeper, Sean works with the entire Soundkeeper staff team, board, and network of community partners, volunteers, and advocates to drive clean water progress across the Puget Sound and its watershed. As an attorney, entrepreneur, and environmental advocate, Sean has worked for years defending communities and ecosystems from pollution, supporting sustainable fisheries, pushing for climate adaptation and mitigation, and fighting for innovative approaches to solving the myriad threats facing our oceans, coasts, and waterways. Before moving to the PNW, Sean worked as an attorney at Hudson Riverkeeper, a local sustainable seafood fishmonger, and, most recently, as Chief of Staff for the Region 1 (New England) office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Sean currently serves as the Publications Officer for the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, and holds an LL.M. in Climate Change Law and a J.D. in Environmental Law from the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, in White Plains, NY, a master’s degree from the Yale School of the Environment, and a B.A. in Marine Biology and Oceanography from Boston University.

Recommended Readings & Media

Credits

This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sarah Westrich, with additional editing by Isabella Nurt, Amy Cavanaugh, Arthur Koenig, Kate Fair, and Marta Kondratiuk. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

There is a line in Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s poem, “When the Animals Leave this Place,” that I find haunting: “They said no one belongs here.”

She’s writing about land that used to flood cyclically but that settlers used for farms and pastures, against the advice of Indigenous elders and without regard for the seasonality of the rain.

Embedded in these six words—“They said no one belongs here”—is the history of conquest and colonialism in America and the mentality of the control of nature, which, to this day, dominates our societal relationship to nature.

The forces of nature and history and a deep knowledge of the land burst forth from Allison’s poem, along with a spirited and iconic crew of animals.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the author or editor of eighteen books and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Her most recent book, Look at This Blue, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is a widely-acclaimed poet, editor, and activist. She was born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas and spent her formative years in three separate locations: North Carolina, Canada, and the Great Plains. Initially dropping out of high school to work fields in order to support herself, Coke completed her GED at age 16 before enrolling in courses at North Carolina State University. She went on to receive an AFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and the First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award, she is now a distinguished professor at the University of California at Riverside. Outside of these duties, she works with underserved incarcerated youth and serves on multiple literary and editorial boards.

Hedge Coke has authored six full-length books of poetry, her first of which (Dog Road Woman) won the 1998 American Book Award. 2022's Look at This Blue was a National Book Award Finalist. More broadly, her works have achieved wide and extensive acclaim. In addition to these collections, she has written ten poetry anthologies and an immensely evocative and powerful memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival, which discusses her upbringing, her story-cultural heritage, and the tumultuous experiences that have helped inform her identity, perspective, and journey.

"When the Animals Leave this Place"

In 1993, Cid Corman selected "When the Animals Leave This Place" for the Charlie and Thelma Willis Memorial Editor's Choice Award (Abiko Quarterly, Kyoto, Japan) and Ed Friedman pressed it in The World, Poetry Project at St. Mark's. "When the Animals Leave This Place" is in Blood Run, Salt Publishing London & Cambridge, UK 2006, US/Global 2007.

Poem reprinted courtesy of Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.

Recommended Readings & Media

Credits

This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sofia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

I love beautiful pictures of animals surrounded by their natural habitats. It’s exhilarating to see idyllic environments and the animals so amazingly well-adapted to live in them. It’s also comforting to know those places still exist, despite what we’re doing to the planet. 

But there’s a danger in that exhilaration and comfort: these animals appear to live in a world so separate from our own, and at the same time, we might be lulled into thinking that this other world and these habitats are safe.

Kara Maria’s paintings take a very different approach to representing animals. Her work features extinct, endangered, and invasive species, but they all float in abstract worlds, popping with color and soaked in the impact of humans on their lives. 

Kara’s work is captivating. It’s also an alarm sounding about the dire threat that Earth’s biodiversity faces in the age of humans. Her paintings of animals bring the biodiversity crisis to our front doorstep and spur us to think about how our actions are at the root of the ecologically devastating changes happening around the world.

Kara Maria is based in San Francisco, and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. She’s been awarded a number of artist residencies, including the Recology Artist in Residence Program at the San Francisco Recycling and Transfer Center, which we talk about in this episode.

This episode is part of the Chrysalis Artists series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Kara Maria

Kara Maria makes paintings and works on paper that reflect on Earth’s biodiversity crisis and the place of endangered species in our increasingly unstable environment. Borrowing from the broad vocabulary of contemporary painting, Maria blends geometric shapes, vivid hues, and abstract marks with representational elements. Her recent work features miniature portraits of disappearing animals, focusing attention on the alarming rate of extinction now being caused by human activity.

Maria received her BA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has exhibited work in solo and group shows throughout the United States at venues including the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, CA; the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, CA; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and the Katonah Museum of Art in New York.

Her work has received critical attention in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Art in America. In addition, Maria has been selected for many awards and honors, including a grant from Artadia, New York, NY; an Eisner Prize in Art from UC Berkeley; and the Masterminds Grant from SF Weekly. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Montalvo Arts Center, Recology Artist in Residence Program, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and at the de Young’s Artist Studio.

Maria’s work appears in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation); the San Jose Museum of Art; and the Cantor Center at Stanford University; among others.

Recommended Readings & Media

Credits

This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sarah Westrich, with additional editing by Arthur Koenig and Marta Kondratiuk. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

If you enjoyed my conversation with Kara, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Before I read Brian Teare’s poem, “Doomstead Days,” I had never heard of a doomstead. It’s a clever portmanteau, combining homestead with doomsday: an alternative universe where the homestead is a preparation for the climate apocalypse.

The poem Brian weaves around his encounter with this word is a lyrical romp through our connection to land, water, and each other. Water flows, gender is fluid, and the rigid binaries of our imaginations dissolve.

Brian’s exploration of the doomstead unearths some vital questions about ecological crisis. How do we respond? How are we, as a society, fleeing to our doomsteads and hiding, waiting for disaster, hoping to survive? What does it look like for us to leave our doomsteads, engage the problems directly, and find collective solutions?

Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and seven books of poetry, including, Doomstead Days, which won the Four Quartets Prize. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including fellowships from Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Pew. He currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. He’s also an editor and publisher and makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

At over 1300 words, this poem is much longer than the others we’ve featured in our Poets series, but it’s worth it.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Brian Teare

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Doomstead Days

Copyright Credit: Brian Teare, "Doomstead Days" from Doomstead Days. Copyright © 2019 by Brian Teare.  Reprinted by permission of Nightboat Books.

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Nightboat Books

Link To Complete Poem

Credits

This episode was researched by Elena Cebulash and edited by Sarah Westrich and Mo Armstrong. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

What is our relationship to the land, to its other-than-human inhabitants, and to the rest of humanity? These are fundamental questions for thinking through how we can transform ourselves in ways that allow a multiplicity of ecologies and human communities to thrive alongside one another. And these questions are not just fundamental to us as individuals—they are essential to how we view our cultures, traditions, institutions, and ways of knowing.

Layel Camargo lives at the vibrant intersection of ecological justice, queer liberation, and indigenous culture—a cultural space that offers a distinctive vantage point on how our societies work, while holding enormous potential to both see and reorient our relationships to the land and to one another.

Layel Camargo is an organizer and artist who advocates for the better health of the planet and its people by restoring land, healing communities, and promoting low-waste and low-impact lifestyles. Layel is a transgender and gender non-conforming person who is an indigenous descendant of the Yaqui and Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert.

I met Layel at a climate storytelling retreat in New York City in 2019, where I became a huge fan of their work and of their way of being in the world.

Layel is a founder of the Shelterwood Collective, a Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ-led community forest and retreat center, healing people and ecosystems through active stewardship and community engagement.

Our conversation explores the idea of culture as strategy in confronting the climate crisis, diving into Layel’s work in video, podcasting, and poetry and the origins of their approach to this work of healing people and planet.

You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Layel Camargo

Layel Camargo is a cultural strategist, land steward, filmmaker, artist, and a descendant of the Yaqui tribe and Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert. Layel is also transgender and non-binary. They graduated from UC Santa Cruz with dual degrees in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies. Layel was the Impact Producer for “The North Pole Show” Season Two. They currently produce and host ‘Did We Go Too Far’ in conjunction with Movement Generation. Alongside Favianna Rodriguez and at the Center for Cultural Power, they created ‘Climate Woke,’ a national campaign to center BIPOC voices in climate justice. Wanting to shape a new world, they co-founded ‘Shelterwood Collective’. The collective is a land-based organization that teaches land stewardship, fosters inventive ideation, and encourages healing for long-term survival. Layel was a Transformative Justice practitioner for 6 years and still looks to achieve change to the carceral system in all of their work. Most recently, Layel was named on the Grist 2020 Fixers List, and named in the 2019 Yerba Buena Center of the Arts list of ‘People to Watch Out For.’

Quotation Read by Layel Camargo

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the s**t that weighs you down.”

- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Recommended Readings & Media

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege  

What is our relationship to the land, to its other-than-human inhabitants, and to the rest of humanity? These are fundamental questions for thinking through how we can transform ourselves in ways that allow a multiplicity of ecologies and human communities to thrive alongside one another. And these questions are not just fundamental to us as individuals—they are essential to how we view our cultures, traditions, institutions, and ways of knowing.

Layel Camargo lives at the vibrant intersection of ecological justice, queer liberation, and indigenous culture—a cultural space that offers a distinctive vantage point on how our societies work while holding enormous potential to both see and reorient our relationships to the land and to one another.

And besides that, Layel is hilarious.

Layel Camargo 

My passion for humor has come from has been maintained by a lot of data and information that I've gotten around just the importance of people being able to process things through laughter. And that the climate crisis is nothing to make mockery and or to laugh, there's this is very serious. The ways in which our species is kind of being at threat of extinction, and right before our eyes. But I think that as humans, we're so complex and layered, and we're so beautiful in the sense that we get to feel so intensely, and feeling is what motivates us to take action. And laughter helps you process so much data quicker, it helps you be able to take something in, embrace it, release, and then have it make an impression.

John Fiege  

I’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis.

Layel Camargo is an organizer and artist who advocates for the better health of the planet and its people by restoring land, healing communities, and promoting low-waste, low-impact lifestyles. Layel is a transgender and gender non-conforming person who is an indigenous descendant of the Yaqui and Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert.

I met Layel at a climate storytelling retreat in New York City in 2019, where I became a huge fan of their work and of their way of being in the world.

Layel is a founder of the Shelterwood Collective, a Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ-led community forest and retreat center, healing people and ecosystems through active stewardship and community engagement.

Our conversation explores the idea of culture as strategy in confronting the climate crisis, diving into Layel’s work in video, podcasting, and poetry and the origins of their approach to this work of healing people and planet.

Here is Layel Camargo.

Conversation

John Fiege

How you doing?

Layel Camargo 

I'm doing pretty good. How are you doing?

John Fiege 

I'm doing well. I've got this thing in my throat. I, so I'm going to be drinking a lot of tea. And I might have to have a bathroom break. Know, I have forgotten to take my allergy medicine. And here we are. Great. Yeah. So can you start out by telling me where you grew up? And how you viewed your relationship to the rest of nature when you were a kid?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah. Um, I can start off by Yeah. talking a little bit about where I grew up. Yeah, so I grew up on the Mexican border between Tijuana and San Diego. And my upbringing was in this very highly dense migrant community from Latinx to Philippines, because of the proximity to the military base. It was very military towns, pretty much the professions. They're like you're either work for Homeland Security, the military or police. And I didn't really notice what my upbringing was like till I left. But I grew up crossing the border back and forth. My grandmother migrated from the Sonoran Desert, to Tijuana. And that's basically where my mother was born. And she grew. She went to high school in San Diego, which is why I can say I'm an American citizen, but I'm a descendant of the Maya or the uremic tribes, my grandmother said, and then my grandfather said, The yucky tribes of the Sonoran Desert so I think for me, my connection ecologically was like the ocean Because I grew up in a beach city, and then it was also the desert, because of all the stories and my grandmother's connection to sanada. So high, I never felt like I was at home because as a queer person paid never really fit into the conservative nature of San Diego due to how militarized it is, and all this stuff. But it was through a drive, which I took from Northern California, down to Sonora, where my grandmother's family lives, when I drove through the saguaros and Arizona that I remember seeing the Saguaro forests and just like needing to pull over and just like, take them in. And I had this a visceral feeling that I don't think I've ever had before of just like being home. And I think this, this experience was like in 2016 2017. And that's when I realized that, in theory, I was a climate activist, I cared about the planet. But it wasn't until that moment that I was like, oh, what I'm actually doing is like actually fighting for us to return to be in better relationship with the planet. And this is where I belong, this is my source of my route, these trees and this desert. So because of that, and growing up in proximity to the beach, water conservation has always been an area of like passion for me and caring about the ocean, which pushed me to a practice of lowering my plastic consumption and being more mindful of oil consumption. And the desert has always been a source of like grounding in regards to like place and knowing that I come from the earth. So it's kind of like I was gonna say, it's kind of like, I'm from a lot of places, I moved to Northern California in 2006. So I love the forest. But nothing speaks to my heart, like the beach in the desert.

John Fiege 

Well, they have sand in common. Is there? Is there a tension between the ocean pulling you in the desert pulling you or is it? Is it a beautiful harmony?

Layel Camargo 

It's a bit of a tension. But I would say that in my body, it feels the same. They both dehydrate me and over, over like it's just a lot of heat, typically. So yeah, that it's different for Northern California beaches, because they're a little bit more Rocky and more cold. You have to wear more layers. Right? definitely like to where I grew up, it's it is warm, the sandy ness. That's a great connection, I definitely need to make that a little bit more concrete.

Totally

John Fiege 

cool. Well, can you tell me more about the path you took from the neighborhood where you grew up in San Diego, to studying at UC Santa Cruz and what that experience was like for you?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, I, I went. So I grew up in a home where there was a lot of violence, which is very common in a lot of migrant-specific and indigenous communities. And I kind of came into my teenage years, like really realizing that I was different, but I didn't know how when it kind of got summarized in college around my queerness my sexuality and my gender, but just feeling this need of like needing to leave. It just didn't make sense for me to be there. And with that being said, I had a wonderful community. I still have quite a few friends in San Diego that I keep in touch with my sisters live there. And I was actually just started last weekend. So I, when I was in San Diego, I think a lot of my trauma responses of like, just ignore what doesn't make sense and just keep moving forward was how I kind of functioned. And that race. And I loved it, I succeeded at it. I've actually realized that I'm a performance artist because of that upbringing. Like I, you know, was captain of the water polo team. I was president of my senior class, I was featured in newspapers for my swimming. I was a competitive swimmer for 10 years. I I did, I did a you know, a good job. I had advanced placement classes and honors classes and I was well rounded but in the inside, I just didn't feel like I belonged. So I picked UC Santa Cruz to go to college because it was the farthest University and the University of California system that had accepted me. And they went and I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I visited the campus like two to three weeks before I had to actually be there to live on campus. Bass. And when my dad drove me, drove me up with my whole family drove me up and they left me they were like, are you sure you want to say I'm like, I got this, like, it was all redwoods. So it was definitely like, we went down to the local store. And it was like all these like hippie dreadlock, folks. And I was like, I don't even know what I got myself into. But I'm getting this degree, so we're good. And it was a big culture shock, I think for a lot of black and brown and indigenous youth when they have to leave their communities to attend. What is like better economic opportunities outside of them it is it's, it's more than just having to adjust, it's having to really like, Oh, I had to let go of everything I knew. And in order for me to take the most out of college, and I was fortunate enough that I had a container a university is like a container for young folks that I wasn't having to leave for work or opportunities. And so I fully immersed myself, and it allowed me to be able to identify myself sexually and through my gender, and a gave me solace, when you know, my family rejected me for coming out. And I think that I'm so fortunate that I had that experience. And then I also was able to gain double bachelor's when feminist studies and legal studies which allowed me to have some upward mobility that my family hadn't had, traditionally I was, I am the first person in my whole family to attend a four year university after high school. So I'm definitely very grateful that that path took me there. And at this point, I feel like it was not only good for me, but it was good for my whole family for me to have taken that journey.

John Fiege 

And did you come out to them? In college or before college?

Layel Camargo 

in college? Yeah, I was my second year, I had my first girlfriend. And I was a Resident Advisor, always I'm always trying to be the overachiever. So I was like Resident Advisor of my college, I was like, involved in every club, I was part of the dance team. And, you know, my mom called me, I just decided to actually move in with my girlfriend the following quarter. And she was like, What are you doing? I was like, Oh, my girlfriend's house. And she was like, why do you have to tell me those things. And I'm just like, because I'm not gonna lie to you. And she was like, I know, you're gay, but I just don't need you to rub it in my face. And I was like, then I guess we can't talk. And so we didn't talk for three months. And then she called me It's, it's, it's hard, you know, like, going to college is hard, especially when I went to very marginalized public schools before that. So I was struggling academically. And my solace was, like, being involved on campus, like to meet some social needs. And I was in, I was in a retention program for black and brown youth from urban communities. So that helped a lot. But I, I, my mom kind of rupturing that, really. I didn't realize what the impact was until probably a quarter the quarter into after that. And she called me three months later, and was like, so are you not gonna talk to me? And I was like, you're the one that doesn't talk to me. And she was like, well, let's just let's just try to make this work. And so we, you know, it took probably five to six years for my family to kind of fully integrate my, you know, my, my lifestyle as they, as they call it. The magic word of magic word. Yeah.

John Fiege 

Yeah, wow. Well, you know, that's just what you need, right in the middle of college trying to adapt to, you know, crazy new culture and world is for your family to reject you.

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, yeah. It's definitely one of those things that like a lot of queer LGBTQ folks. I, I feel like it's so normalized to us, right? And it's just like, well, when you come up, just expect to lose everything. And I think it is it now until I'm like, in my 30s, that I realized how painful that is, and how, like, it's just like, you know, one of the core things I think, as a human species is to know that you belong somewhere. And if you don't belong at home, then where do you belong? And I think for many of us, we've had to go through that unconsciously, without really thinking through that we're seeking to belong. And this theme of belonging has been something that's been coming up as I'm I navigate like, my professional career now is that like, I really do want people to feel like they belong somewhere. And the only thing I feel like makes sense as we all belong to the planet. We all belong to the same descendants and how we got here as a species and that I think that's being rejected from my family allowed me to be like weird do I belong? And so I fortunate that I had a best friend who was also queer. I had my queer community I had student governments and students social organizing. And then when I graduated, I was like, wait, like, Where else do I belong? So I went to my natural habitats like to the beach, and I picked up surfing again and scuba diving. And then it was like, Oh, I actually like I belong to the earth. Like, that's where I belong.

John Fiege 

That's beautiful. Yeah. I love that. Oh, I am hearing some background noise.

Layel Camargo 

Is it audio? Or is it just like,

John Fiege 

people laughing?

Layel Camargo 

It's my partner's on an Akai here, I'm going to shoot her a quick text. She like gets really loud because she gets so excited. Just going to share a quick text.

John Fiege 

So before coming to climate justice work, you worked as an organizer with the Bay Area transformative justice collective. Can you tell me how your work in transformative justice informed your understanding of the climate crisis and how you approach ecological concerns?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, so I I organized with transformative justice for about six years. And then I you know, for folks who don't know, transformative justice is an alternative response model to violence, harm and hurt. And so similar to restorative justice, which works with the carceral system, so police, judicial systems, etc. to reform in order to help alleviate some of the biases that exists in the systems, transformative justice, as there's those systems actually don't serve certain communities like migrants, folks like that are trans, just the way that those systems just inherently violate certain people who are not included in our society fairly, was like, transparent justice exists to serve folks who cannot access or choose not to access or use the carceral system. So if you will, if you believe in defunding the police, and let's say you're sexually assaulted, you're probably not going to call the police for a rape kit, because there's probably ways that you've experienced those systems as harmful or violent. So when I started organizing were transferred to justice the spoke to me as somebody who had just come out as trans, somebody who grew up in a mixed status family, have relatives who have been deported. And I realized, like, Oh, it's actually worth investing in alternative models, besides the police. In order for us to get our needs met when crisises do happen, because they happen to all of us. And I was in it for six years, you know, we had built up, I had built a great capacity to work with people who had caused harm people who are caused domestic violence, sexual assaults and transforming their behavior and working towards reparation of relationships and or just like helping victims be able to move on after something like that happens. And it's it wasn't an easy task. And what we would come back to is we would spend like the first front of the months, trying to make sure that people's basic needs were met in order for them to slow down enough to process what had just happened. And basic needs included food included shelter, if they lived near, you know, a toxic site, what was infringing on their health, making sure that they had access to health coverage or health benefits. And that was about 60% of what we're doing was making sure that we could get the basics kind of stable so that they could jump into really honoring what it was a justice look like for them. And in doing this a handful of times, not too many, I will say I didn't think thankfully, we had a team. And so I did wasn't always having to handle everything. And we, the experiences that I did have, I was like, man, if people just had, like, a healthy environment where having to fight for housing wasn't a thing. Like we could just actually say, this is where I was born, this is where I belong, and I'm in relationship with the land. And that's how I feed myself, I clothe myself, like all these things that are kind of like indigenous traditional ways, then people could actually solve a lot of their crisis. He's in the moment without having it to be delayed years or having to rely on for it to get outsourced through the carceral system in order for them to feel like they get a minuscule amount of justice. And so I started to just be more cognizant of the way that we interact with the planet and how are everything from our legal structures to our economic structures are just completely devastating. Our environment that have led for us not to have good air quality for us not to have good clean water for us not to feel like we've belong to the earth that is right beneath us that we like, are in relationship with, with the rest of you know, most of our lives. And I, at the time I was living in West Oakland and I had just looked into the air quality report in the area I lived in, and I had the worst air quality in the whole Bay Area. And I started noticing my dog started developing like little spots on her skin, I started having like a lot of chronic coughing. And I was looking at how much money I was making. And so at the time, I was doing a lot of our pop ups, I was really passionate about zero waste, I cared about veganism, a lot of it was through the planet, and it just slowly started shifting away from Yes, I care about how we respond to violence and harm and all of that. And I want us to have alternatives that meet the needs of folks who fall through the waistline of certain systems. And at the same time, we don't even have clean water to come home to to drink when something violent happens, like we have to go buy it from, you know, a grocery store. Most of us don't even test our tap water anymore, because it's just consistently, we just grew up thinking that it doesn't, it's dirty, it's gross, it's non potable, so Right, right. I think at that moment, my heart just completely was like, I want to dive into this work 100% I want to fight for people to have clean air, like if you can't breathe, then you can't, you can't even do a lot, a lot of things. And so many black and brown people who grew up in rural communities have high rates of asthma have like low life expectancy because of air pollution, to you know, the logistics industry etc. And I just kind of fell in with all my heart in like, if I'm, if I'm against plastic put which at the time I was, like vegan for the planet and vegan for my health. And I was also really passionate about reducing plastic use. And I was like, if these are two things that I care about, I want to do it at a larger scale. So it meant that I had to really make those connections of if I want to end gender based violence, if I want to end large forms of violence, I have to start with the one common thing we have that we're constantly extracting and violating, which is the earth. And I think that that led me towards climate justice, because that is the most critical environmental crisis that we're in at this moment.

John Fiege 

So what is the climate crisis? What what what causes is how do you how do you think about culture as a source of power and strategy for climate crisis?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, I mean, I this is this is really, you know, this, that this is what I do for my life is I spent the last 7 to 8 years really strategizing around what are the cultural shifts that are needed in order for us to be able to be in right relationship with the planet where things like the climate crisis are not happening, so that we can have an economic system and a political system that is serves the planet and the needs of our of us living and thriving, not surviving, which is I think, what we're stuck in as a global society now. And the, we have like quite a few things to kind of look at historically. And I think that there is a dominance of, which is we now know, it is like white supremacy, which is the idea that one group of human is like better than another group of human, and that because of that, everybody else needs to conform to the languages, the culture, the food, the clothes, the housing structures, that are pervasive, and that in, you know, the Euro centric way of living, and that has created a monoculture that is now spread at a global scale. And it's even because it's an economic sister in their economic system. Now we have global stock markets. Now we have the extraction at a global scale, for the sourcing of consumer goods that are all homogenous, and there. There's just one kind of how we do things. And I think the crisis that we're in is the ways that human have removed ourselves from our natural biodiversity relationships with our ecological systems. And then as removing ourselves we have are allowed for the rupture of a relationship that is very needed, which is if we're not integrated into the trees that are natural in our environment into trimming certain invasive species and supporting other biodiverse relationships around us, then we're crippling the ability of the soil to be healthy of the air to have the most amount of oxygen Have you Now we know that we need to be trapping carbon at such high rates. And I think that with a crisis that we're in is that we've allowed and have fallen victims to white supremacy, which was facilitated by colonization, that I, you know, that dominance of one group of people in the way of existing, and I think that's where we're at. I mean, if you look at the kelp forests, the kelp forest needs the otters, they need the, the sea urchins. But when you remove the otters and the sea urchins, you know, are not being preyed upon at a normal scale. And that's, you know, we're connecting it to white supremacy, let's assume that the sea urchins are like the dominant and because they're, they're the ones that ruled the kelp species are starting to be eradicated, and some of them are becoming a threat of extinction. And without a healthy kelp forests, you don't have healthy oxygen and maintenance of the acidification in the ocean, which, you know, couple that with global warming, and you basically have the rapid eradication of so many other natural ecosystems in the ocean that we need to survive. And so when you have one species dominating over another, it leads towards a crisis. So I think we're in a imbalance of relationships because of, of white supremacy. And that's what's causing the climate crisis we have. We have a monoculture. And so just as you look at mono cropping, as you look at anything that eradicates the health of the soil, because it doesn't have the reciprocal relationships that it needs from other crops, and are the resting in order for the soil to be healthy. This might not be speaking to everybody who's listening. But it makes sense that like, Yeah, definitely. The environment crisis is a symptom of Yes. Oh, the climate crisis is a symptom of a larger systemic problem.

John Fiege 

Yeah. And in so many ways, white supremacy was created by colonialism, like, white supremacy is the cultural system that in some ways had to emerge to justify the political and economic brutality of colonialism. You know, it was a it was it was a way of organizing and understanding the world that justified these terrible things that were happening. And they're so it goes so much hand in hand.

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I could talk about this for hours, because there's just so many ways in which we can break it down to the minute level. And then there's so many ways that we can think about solutions. And a lot of my my work and my passion is really bringing as much power as I can to black, indigenous and people of color. Because the retention of culture, language, and different ways of engaging with the world, everything from how we grow our food to how we dress and what we celebrate. And where we honor is what's going to help us be more resilient towards the impending and the realism of what the climate crisis means to a lot of our communities.

John Fiege 

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And you're you're living and working at this really interesting intersection between ecological justice, queer liberation and indigenous culture. Can Can you talk a bit about the intersections of your identity and cultural background and their importance to you and how you orient yourself to this work?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, definitely. So as I mentioned, I'm a descendant of the Yaki and the Mio tribes in the Sonoran Desert. And I didn't really realize how much this matter to me, I think till about like five to six years ago, because I grew up because of the borders. Technically, I'm Mexican descent, and Mexican American salesperson in this country. But the Mexican government is similar to what we're talking about white supremacy was created by European settlers and, and a hybrid of mixture of stealing of indigenous cultures. And there are so many subgroups of different indigenous cultures. And my heritage is that both my grandfather and my grandmother's tribe as they were nomadic, and they used to migrate up and down the Sonoran Desert, before the border was there from seasonally for survival. And there's so many ways that like food that we eat, how we dress, how we talk that I didn't realize like, Oh, that makes me so much more than just Mexican American. It makes me more than just Latinx. And I think my background and being in such close proximity to immigration and the necessity of immigration or to survive because my grandmother came to Tijuana because it was industrialized and she needed work. And so when they migrated, they like left everything behind. And they never went back. Like, I think so many people leave their home, thinking that they're going to go back and they don't, their children are born in different places. And eventually, that led me to be born in a different country. And so because of that background, I am so keen to issues around native sovereignty and land back here in the United States is like the retention of keeping people in the place of their origin is a climate solution. It's a way of keeping that ancestral knowledge in the place that is needed. I mean, here in Northern California, we look at the wildfire crisis, and it's due to climate change. And it's also due to the lack of forest management, that our indigenous relatives that are native to that area have been robbed of the opportunity to maintain those forests at the scale, which is needed in order to adapt and prepare for wildfires. Yeah,

John Fiege 

yeah, with with the prescribed burning, and all that maintenance that used to happen. That was invisible in so many ways to the European colonists, they didn't even understand that that was going on, or how it worked.

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, and I feel like, you know, it goes back to the monoculture. And I think, because I have indigenous ancestry, because I understand the nature of needing to migrate. And the realities of migrant experience, I think I feel so passionate about keeping people in their place of origin as much as possible, and allowing for people to move freely when they have to. And I think as as the climate crisis gets worse, I started to realize just what a disservice we have made by instilling borders by having governments that have been so gatekeeping and operating off of scarcity, that we've kind of mandated a world where people can move freely people, and people have to leave their place of origin. And that these two paradox that we exist in, is creating the dehumanization of a group of people that if you cannot sustain yourself in your place of origin, because of global extraction, by the way, because of environmental degradation and the economic viability of your area, and how that creates wars and mass extraction, that that is why people migrate. But yet those same people who are creating those systems that make it difficult for you to stay in your place of origin have also created borders to not let you move freely. That paradox to me is also part of this climate crisis as because many of us are going to have to leave john, at some point, there's going to be floods, there's going to be hot water, we're experiencing a drought prices in California, I'm actually living between northern California and Southern California already. And a lot of it is because of the wildfires and my family's down here. And my family's at threat of sea level rise by living in San Diego, which San Diego filed a lawsuit against Exxon and Chevron. And I think one or two other oil companies is we're all we're all existing now in this global climate crisis, that it's not quite in our face every day, but we feel it seasonally now, so we're gonna have to be able to move. Right? So yeah, and last to say is like similar to my cultures I have I lived with an end an endocrine illness. And so air pollution is something that could severely impede my ability to reproduce my ability to function. At this point, I spend about four to five days a month in bed, working from bed, and I'm fortunate enough that I get to work remotely. But for a lot of people, we're going to see more and more ways in which the mass destruction of the planet which has led to the climate crisis is how we become to adopt ways of having different abilities or not being able to live our day to day function. So yeah, the intersecting points are just, they're overwhelming. And I think a lot of us are starting to feel that more as things start to kind of get a little worse.

John Fiege 

Right, right. Yeah, I was talking to, to my partner the other day, she was she was talking to a fellow activist about this idea of ableism. And how, you know, so much of the discourse around it is you know, what are your abilities and, and this, this person was talking about how it it's how unstable that is. Like you can be able bodied today and tomorrow, you can be not able bodied in the same way. Because of, you know, like you say the changing air quality or something happens, or you just you're getting old, or you get sick. And it's one of those things that we've so ignored as a culture of what, what ableism really means about our assumptions about the world.

Layel Camargo 

And like the economic viability and how our economic system is just so dependent on us being fully productive 24 seven, which I made a video on this called The Big Sea, which talks about the intersecting points of labor and how the labor crisis is actually the root of our climate crisis. Because if we can have people have a bigger imagination around how they can use their bodies, to serve their own needs, instead of serving the needs of corporate interests, how that would actually alleviate a lot of pressure on the planet. And that that would potentially lead to our most successful outcomes in regards to the climate crisis.

John Fiege 

Yeah, totally, totally. Well, can you tell me about decolonizing conservation in the environmental movement and what that looks like to you?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, so I, I started during the beginning of the pandemic, I started a nonprofit called shelterwood collective, which is black and brown and indigenous queer folks who are aiming to steward land at the time, I was aiming to sort of land a month ago, we acquired a 900 acre camp in cassada, California, and Northern California and our team is about conservation efforts, specifically with forest resiliency against wildfires. Taking Western Western practices of conservation, mixing them with indigenous practices that are similarly to conservation. And I feel like when we think about conservation efforts, a lot of them have been dictated by European ways of thinking through conserving natural environments, which a lot of it is like humans are bad, nature must be left uncared for. And this does such a disservice because our indigenous ancestors knew that in order for a forest to be thriving, we needed to be in relationship with it, we needed to monitor monitor it, if there was a fun guy or a virus that was spreading their disease, that we could actually help it, he'll help trees, he'll help it spread less, if there was fires that were coming that we could trim, and tend and do controlled burns, if there was, you know, sucks anything happening where a species was struggling, that we could help support its growth and its population by you know, hunting its predators. And so I think that, that is the challenge between indigenous conservation efforts are traditional ways of just being in relationship with the natural environment and conservation is the western conservation is that we have been so removed from what it means to protect water systems, what it means to protect forests, that now we have a crisis of mismanagement we have and that more and more countries are adopting European Western perspectives because of the dominance that white supremacy has instilled that there are certain group of people that know more than we do. And that's just that's created, at least for me feels very heavy on when it comes to wildfires. There is certain areas in Northern California where there have been residential communities that have been built on wildfire lines that we know now, indigenous people knew that like every 30 years, for every 50 years, there would be a wildfire that would run through that area. And now that we're not that it's getting hotter, the gap of that time is getting shortened. And also that we're realizing that the years, hundreds of years of mismanagement, and lack of tending has led to also these extreme wildfires, that's now causing casualties outside of wildlife. And I feel like conservation needs to evolve. I think that there needs to be more understanding around the harm that Western conservation has done to not only the ecosystems but to the people who have traditionally been keeping those ecosystems. And I do feel like it's like it's evolving. I just think that it's not evolving as fast as we need. And unfortunately, with the climate climate crisis, we're gonna have to really come to recognize what do we need to move really fast on on what can wait because it just feels like Everything's urgent, we need to save the oceans as much as we need to save the forest as much as we need to Save the Redwoods as much as we need to take the rain forests and it just feels like and and that is like the natural environment, then we have like the growing list of extinction, threats of extinction for certain animals. And I think that I don't know why just came to my head. And then you have people like Bill Gates who want to eradicate a whole mosquito species. So it just feels like we're gonna have to pick and choose our battles here. And I do feel like coming to reckoning around the harm that this pervasiveness in western conservation, which isn't the idea that sometimes we are harmful to, you know, our natural ecosystems isn't a bad one. Yeah, we are. But how we got here was by completely removing ourselves and not knowing how to take care of those ecosystems, had we been in a relationship with them for the last 100 years, maybe we wouldn't be so wasteful, maybe we would have caught air pollution sooner than then our body is telling us, hey, we don't like this, this is bad, we're gonna die sooner if you keep doing this. And I think that that is a disservice. So it's beautiful to see more forest schools popping up for young people. It's beautiful to see more conservation groups trying to bring in indigenous leaders into the conversations. But I do feel like that overall idea needs to shift. And I also think that the land back movement, which is returning national parks back to indigenous hands, is going to help alleviate some of those major tensions that do not honor that certain people have been doing this for hundreds of years. And if we don't return it in this generation, we just run the risk of losing more language, more culture and more practices that we need at a larger scale.

John Fiege 

Yeah, in protecting ecosystems is just not a complete picture of everything that's needed. Like as you say, it's important on some level, but it's it's not it's not a whole, it's not a whole understanding of of the problem or how to address it. There reminds me I was I was just reading or rereading a bit of Robin wall kimmerer book braiding sweetgrass, and she talks, she talks about this very issue a bunch about, you know, sweet grass in particulars is something where there's this, this back and forth relationship between humans and nature. And she talks about teaching one of her University classes up here in New York, and asking them at the beginning of the semester, you know, whether people are bad for the environment, and almost everybody says yes. And we also

Layel Camargo 

have this this perception of we are bad. Right?

John Fiege 

Yeah. Yeah, this Western guilt is pervasive in that as well. Which is,

Layel Camargo 

which is facilitated by religion? Yes, religion has a very good job of making us feel like we are horrible for everything that we have sent us that we need to repent for our whole existence as like, going from embryo to sperm is actually a sin itself. So we're born with so much already on our shoulders.

John Fiege 

I was gonna say Catholic guilt, but I feel like at this point, it's so much broader than that. Yeah, it is. So you work with the Center for cultural power. And, and one of the main projects you've done with them is climate woke. And I'd like to start by saying how much i'd love the artwork of the logo. It says climate woke. And it's in, in the style of this fabulous flashback 1980s airbrushed t shirts, with, you know, rainbow colors and sparkles. And it feels like there's so much meaning embedded in the artwork. And I wondered if you could tell me about climate woke, how the project emerge, but also like how this logo artwork reflects what this project is.

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, so we when we started thinking about what climate woke would be, we didn't know what's going to be called climate woke it was through several meetings with different community partners, different funders and other stakeholders, where we kind of discussed that we wanted a unifying symbol for all the communities that we had been meeting and we kind of landed that we wanted something to look good to represent black Dan Brown young people between the ages of 16 to 25, something that was appealing that somebody would wear with pride. And, you know, at the time, there was a lot of like, different stuff coming up around the importance of wokeness. The it wasn't used as how we use it now, which is like political correctness. It's, it's, it's not where it is now. And so we decided to kind of ride on the, the term itself climate woke, which talks about uses black vernacular very intentionally that this is a racialized issue. And we spoke with several leaders in the black community, and at the time, it felt like it made sense. And, and so we kind of quickly were like, this makes sense kind of work. We want people to wake up to a climate crisis, but also be like down and enjoy it. And that it's different than this doom and gloom narrative that we constantly see when it comes to the environment. As it is kind of depressing when you think about it. But so we wanted it to feel like inviting. And at the time, which I think was like 2017 2018. All these like 90s was like coming back. So we sat with like two or three potential designers, and we didn't really like what we saw. And then it was heavy and agile that he Guess who is kind of a co creator of this. Also, like a globally recognized artist who was like, hold on, I got this and just like hopped on her computer through some colors, did some and we were like, We love it. Like we just love it. We wanted it to be bright. We wanted it to be inviting. And I feel like we've been successful just two weeks ago actually got a text from my executive producer who works on the planet. Well, content, it was like to send a photo of like, I believe it was a young male of color about 21 or 22 years old wearing a climate woke t shirt. And she was like, do you know where that's from? And he was like, No, I have no idea. And I was like, that's how, you know, we succeeded. Because we popularize something, we made it look so good. People don't necessarily need to make the connections, but they'll be promoting our work. And I'm sure and I get so many compliments when I wear t shirts and sweaters. And so she she told him to look up the videos. And you know, she sent me the photo. And she's like, we've I think we've succeeded. And I was like, I think we succeeded, I think we have you know. But at this moment, we are considering evolving the terminology because it doesn't feel as honoring. And we definitely are very sensitive to the fact that we use black vernacular intentionally. And it's time to kind of give it back and think through like what other ways can we popularize other terms to kind of help. It's about it's about to help kind of build the community because it was about building a group of people kind of drawing in a certain community that wouldn't necessarily be about it. And I feel like that to me was like a, we did it. We did it.

John Fiege 

Yeah, it's it's it's definitely one of those terms that the the right has co opted and really done a number on they. Yeah, they're they're good at stealing those terms and turning them on their head. And usually, honestly, as a as a weapon back the other direction. Can you turn down your volume just to hear again, just noticing when you get excited? I get excited so much. Alright, how's that? Right? Great. Yes. So in a couple of your videos, you talk about what being climate milk means to you. And you say it means one, standing up for communities of color and communities most impacted by climate change, to complicating the conversations on climate in the environment. And three, doing something about it. Can you take me through each of these and break them down a bit?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, so the first one is, can you repeat it again, that's the first

John Fiege 

standing up for communities of color and communities most impacted by climate change,

Layel Camargo 

right? That's right. Yeah, I've said it so much. And we actually haven't even recorded anything because of the pandemic. So I'm like, I haven't said it in a while. Yeah, standing up for communities of color. I think that that one to me specifically spoke to that. We need black, brown and indigenous people to feel protected and seen when it comes to the climate and environmental crisis. And that's everything from activating people in positions of power to empowering the people who come from those communities to know that this is an intersectional issue. I think that the climate crisis traditionally was like a lot of visuals of melting ice caps, a lot of visuals of the polar bears and you It's interesting because as we're getting more people narrative, I feel like the, we need to get a little bit more people narrative. And we need to return those images a little bit back, because the IPCC report has just been highlighting the rapid rates in which we were losing ice. And I think that when I initially thought of this at the time, there wasn't highlights of how indigenous people were protecting the large scale biodiversity that we have on the planet. There wasn't stories of, you know, urban, black or brown youth trying to make a difference around solutions towards climate change. And so I kind of made it my purpose that climate woke represent those demographics that we that I was important for me that black, brown and indigenous people of color were at the center of the solutions. And the complicated conversations and do something about it was that I actually feel like we have a crisis of binary versus complexity in our society. And I think that how we've gotten into this climate crisis is because everything's been painted. So black and white for us, that if you want a job, you have to be harming the planet, if you want to be unemployed, then. And then like all these hippies that are fighting to save the trees, they're taking away your job, you know. So I feel like there's so many ways in which our trauma responses just look for the patterns have been used against us. And it just felt really important for me, that people feel comfortable to complicate as much as possible, where we're gonna need different angles and different ways of looking at solutions that we need to embrace experimentation, where we need to embrace failures, and we need to really let go of these ideas that technology is going to come in and save us technology is a big reason why we got into this mess. And so I think that complicating the conversation to me was about this is like, if you are black, brown, indigenous, and you want to be a part of the climate crisis, but you have no way of integrating yourself besides talking about gender oppression, go for it, look at look at the leaders in this movement, and look at how many women are fighting and protecting, you know, at a larger global scale that don't get the visibility that they deserve. So I feel like that was my aim is to really invite that complexity. And then let's do something about it is that I don't want things to get stuck on the dialog. One of the biggest failures of the United Nations when addressing these crisises is that they don't have global jurisdiction. So they cannot actually mandate and or enforce a lot of these, it's usually done through economic influence, or like if one if we can get a first world to sign on to a certain agreement, then hopefully, they'll all do it. But then who ends up in implementing it, usually it's not the United States and Europe is not the first one to do it. And yet, we are the biggest global polluters on almost every sector you can think of. And I think that the do something about it is, for me a call to action, that we can talk about this, we can try to understand carbon emissions, methane emissions, global greenhouse, carbon markets, carbon, sequestering drawdown methods, we can talk about it. But if we're not doing it, putting it to practice while integrating these other two points, which is centering communities of color, and embracing the complexity of that, then it's nothing, it's pointless. We're just we're just allowing corporations to keep exploiting the planet and governments can keep, you know, sitting back and saying that they're doing something because they're convening people without actually regulating and putting down their foot for us. So, yeah, I think it was trying to summarize just my general feelings of this movement and the ways that there's been just lack of opportunities by not centering certain other people or allowing there to be more complexity.

John Fiege 

Yeah, there's, I find, watching how those un meetings go down. So frustrating. Yes, just, you know, Time after time. It's just maddening. I'd have a hard time working in that space.

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, I think I was fortunate enough to take I voluntarily took like a law class at pace, Pace University, pace law University, and one of the classes was United Nations policy, and so I got to witness the sub All meetings before that big meeting where Leonardo DiCaprio came out and said that we had a climate crisis, which everybody googled what the climate crisis was, I think it was called climate change. It was like the most time climate change was googled in the history of mankind. And I was sitting in those meetings and just seeing how it really is just a lot of countries just try not to step on each other's toes, because relationships translate into the economic sector, that I'm like, wow, y'all, like legit, don't care about the people you're representing?

John Fiege 

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it's crazy. Well, I wanted to talk a bit about what environmental justice means to you. And I thought we could start with your video called a power to rely on. And in your crudest, you include a statistic in the video that says in the US 75% of all houses without electricity, are on Navajo land. And, and then one of the people you interview in the video with Leah, John's with a group called native renewables, says, whoever controls your water and your power controls your destiny. And that's really powerful statement. Can Can you talk a bit about your experience working on this video, and how it impacted your thinking about environmental justice?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, so I, I realized that I'm really passionate about renewable energy and alternatives to energy capturing, probably through working on this video. And when we were first thinking about what themes we were going to cover, that's usually how I approached most of the climate world videos as I tried to talk to a few community partners. But mostly, I just do a lot of like, cultural observation, just like what are some of the themes that feel that are kind of resonating for people outside of the sector. So what's resonating for folks outside of the environmental justice world, and, you know, land back native sovereignty is something that's been popularized, especially after the Standing Rock camp, the no dapple camp, and I was noticing that it was kind of dwindling down. But a lot of data was coming up around the fact that a lot of indigenous communities are either sitting around and or holding and protecting 80% of the global biodiversity. And so something that how I approached this video was I wanted to show the native sovereignty piece with the land back as well as my passion for alternatives to our current energy use. And what Haley Johns is somebody who was recommended to me by Jade bug guy who's also featured in the videos, a dear close, like cultural strategist, filmmaker, co conspire in the sector. And she would I had initially approached her and said, I want ndn collective, which is what she works to kind of help us think through the script. And she said, Yeah, we're down and like, we trust you, like, we know you're gonna get the story, right, but we're down. And so it was, it was very easy for us to start with that. And then when I was like, Who do I talk to? They're like, you need to talk to a hayleigh. And I was like, Alright, let's talk to a healer. And so I flew out to Arizona, just to have a scout meeting with her, which I felt like I was chasing her down, because we didn't know she was going to be in Flagstaff, or if she was going to be near Phoenix, like we didn't know. So we were flying in. And we were like, Where are you today? She's like, I'm at my mom's house. I'm with my mom at this hotel. And we're like, Alright, we're coming through. So it felt very, like family off the bat, which now she has been nominated for I forget the position, but it's the internal affairs of Indian energy, energy efforts and some sort. So she's she's doing it at a federal level now. And when I was when I was working on this video, and I had talked to her and I interviewed her as she was giving me a lot of these numbers, and I just realized that, you know, the irony of this country is just beyond what we could imagine. You have a lot of these coal mines that help fuel some of the larger energy consuming cities and in the United States, like Vegas, like la that just consume energy at such high rates that are being powered by coal mines in Navajo or near Navajo Denae reservations. And yet, I was hearing about what halos program and her efforts were just trying to get funding and or subsidies from the government in order to put solar panels on folks his house because the infrastructure doesn't exist. And she was running she's letting me know about that. cost, she's like at $75,000 per house. And then we in order to like run the lines, and that's not even including the solar panel infrastructure. And then if they can't, we can't run the lines, and we're talking about batteries. And she was breaking this all down, I'm like, that is a lot of money. We need to get you that money. And then she started just educating us more through that. So I think I went into this video just knowing that I was going to try to make those connections. But what I realized was that I was actually going in to learn myself, just how much I need to humble myself with the realities that communities who have had less to nothing in certain things, everything from food, to energy to water, have made alternatives that they are, they've already created the solutions like we found one of the elders who had put up one of the first solar panels and Hopi reservation, which I highlighted in my video, she got it 30 years ago, like I, I was flabbergasted that she had the foresight, and the way that she articulated was everything from comfort to entertainment. But at the end of the was she knew she needed power. And she runs a business, the local business won a very few on the reservation that she was passionate enough to keep alive. And so this video just showed me that like, wherever you go, where there has been disenfranchisement, that's where you will find solutions. Because a lot of people have just making do for a long time, it just hasn't been seen, it hasn't been highlighted. Those are the people that like the UN should be talking to the you know, our federal government should be listening to.

John Fiege 

Yeah, and I actually wanted to talk to you about Janice de who's the Hopi elder that you mentioned. And, you know, in particular, how it relates to how depth and skillful you are communicating with people from a wide range of backgrounds. in you, you you use humor a lot. And in this power to rely on video, you're sitting down with Janice day. And talking about how she's one of the first people to get solar power 30 years ago. And you asked her whether the first thing she charged with solar power would be a vibrator. And that was that was that was really funny. And all of a sudden, I'm watching with anticipation, asking myself, how is this woman going to react to that question? And you seem to have such a good read on the people you're speaking with. And I was hoping you could talk a bit more about how you communicate so many, so well and so many in so many different spaces and how you consciously or unconsciously lubricate the relationships with humor.

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, I've been I I think a lot of it is my passion for humor has come from has been maintained by a lot of data and information that I've gotten around just the importance of people being able to process things through laughter. And that the climate crisis is nothing to make mockery and or to laugh, there's this is very serious. The ways in which our species is kind of being at threat of extinction, and right before our eyes. But I think that as humans, we're so complex and layered, and we're so beautiful in the sense that we get to feel so intensely and feeling is what motivates us to take action. And laughter helps you process so much data quicker, it helps you be able to take something in, embrace it, release, and then have it make an impression that is the one line that everybody brings up with that video. So I made the impression. And I hope that people watched it and then wanted to show it to other people. And so I think that, that that knowledge has retained my passion for humor. And then like I said, You know, I grew up in an abusive home where we had to process things fairly quickly in order to be able to function in the world to go to school to go to work. And growing up in a home where there was a lot of violence. I learned how to read people very keenly everything from anticipating when something was going to happen tonight, and I speak about that pretty like nonchalantly because I think a lot of us have a lot of strategies and skills that we've developed because of our traumas and our negative experiences that we've had in the world. And I think they don't often get seen as that we'll just say like, Well, I was just really I'm just really good at reading people and we'll leave it at that and it's like, but what is your learn that from like, there have been many chronic situations where you had to be really good at reading people in order for you to like practice it so clearly in it skillfully. And so I think I honor my experience in that in order for me to do that. And then I think cultural relativity and cultural content petencies is another thing like, Janice de actually reminds me a lot of my grandmother and my grandmother was somebody who was very religious. And at the same time, I always loved pushing her buttons. I would just like try to say things to get her activated. And I knew at the end of the day, she loved me. And that was about it. I didn't have to question whether she loved me because she was upset that I asked her something and appropriately. So I think it's a combination of that. And I'm grateful that I can embody that and be able to offer it to people who are curious about climate change and and feel more invited through laughter than they would about doom and gloom or heavy statistic videos and our ways of gathering information.

John Fiege 

Awesome. Well, another kind of video you made is called consumerism, cancelled prime. And the first shot is you waiting while the camera crew sets up the shot and you're putting items in your Amazon cart on your phone. And then the quote unquote real video begins. And and you say 80% of California's cargo goes through the Inland Empire. And then you yell along expletive that's beeped out. And you ask emphatically his climate, wrote, his climate woke about to ruin amazon prime for me. And and I love how rather than just saying Amazon, or Amazon customers are bad. You're starting by implicating yourself in this system that leads to serious environmental justice issues. And again, it's really funny. Can you talk more about the situation with Amazon and other real retailers? And and how you went about positioning yourself in this story, and using humor again, and self criticism to connect to the audience?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, I mean, when we first started working on this video, we explore different avenues of that opening scene, when we wanted to highlight community members, I kind of at this point, have a pretty good like tempo of what it is that I want. I want a community member I want somebody who's like academic or scientifically based, and then somebody else who kind of comes in allows her to be more of a creative flow. So we have a pretty good structure at this point of the voices that we seek, we just didn't know how we wanted to hook the audience. And we went back and forth quite a bit on this, the thing that kept coming up was amazon prime memberships are very common. Most people have them most people buy on e commerce and this is pre COVID. And I was keenly aware of that I also knew that Amazon was growing as a franchise to now own Whole Foods that were just like expanding in regards to what it is that they offer people online. And as I mentioned, I, through my passion for reduction of plastic usage and plastic consumption, and plastic waste, I understand the ways that ecommerce has really hurt the planet. So I myself am not an Amazon Prime member, I I don't actually buy online and I allow myself when needed one Amazon thing a purchase a year. And it's like kind of more of a values align thing. So in order for me to reach connecting with somebody who's kind of a little bit more normal in regards to needing to rely on buying online, is I just had to exaggerate what I think happens when you're shopping, which is you look at a lot of stuff, you add them to cart, you get really excited, and then you kind of mindlessly click Buy without knowing what's going to happen. But you're excited when it arrives, surprisingly, because maybe you bought it in the middle of the night while drinking some wine and watching some Hulu. So that's like what I was trying to embody. And then what I was really trying to highlight in this video was I wanted to invite audiences to not feel shame about what they do, like we are we've all been indoctrinated by the system through what our education has taught us. Like we have values of individualism and patriotism and all these things, because that's what we were taught in schools. And that's been used and co opted by corporations in order for us to continue exploiting other humans and the planet. And that's by no fault of our own. That's a design that's an economic model that was designed since the Great Depression. It's just the way that it's been exaggerated and has scaled so quickly is beyond our control where our governments don't even regulate it anymore at the ways in which they should be. And I think that I wanted this to feel like it's not just on you as an individual, but it's specifically if you live in Europe or in the United States. You need to know that we are The biggest consumers on the planet, we have the most economic resources. We actually, if even a fraction of the United States decided to stop shopping at Amazon, we could significantly bring that Empire down. I say Empire pretty intentionally. And we could I mean, I feel like you. And that's and how I understand economics is that all you need to do is impact 10 to 20%. of supply and demand chain in order for a whole corporation to collapse. The problem is, is that our governments always come in to aid these large corporations that are hurting us on the planet by saying that they want to maintain jobs and maintain a GDP are going stock market, which they're reliant on. So this video was meant for audiences. And for people to feel like this is not just on you. But if you live in a first world nation, you have power, and I need you to use it. And at the same time, it's a bigger system. So it's not going to be enough for us to cancel our amazon prime memberships. It's also going to be on us to support community organizers, sign petitions, when possible join council meetings, you know, call your senators and your mayors. And we worked with Athena, which is a labor organization that's specifically has an anti Amazon campaign. And so they were kind of feeding us a little bit of our talking points. So we actually wanted to go the video mostly on a system scale, talk about how the systems need to shift, but they were really pushing for the US to bring in that individualism component. Because as difficult that is as it is to digest. As a consumer in the United States, my power of influence is like three to five times more than somebody else living in the global south. So it felt important to do those two intersections, but we're really just trying to hook people where they're at. So if you shop at amazon, and you want to watch that video, like don't feel like we're gonna call you out or make you feel like a horrible person, like, it's it's not it's not our fault, but we do have power.

John Fiege 

And can you talk about what the situation is with the trucks in the distribution centers? And like, what's the environmental justice issue there?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, I mean, so there's the manufacturing of goods, which the manufacture of goods is done through a large global scheme, things are extracted and raw material. High mineral producing areas like Africa, South America, different places like that, then the raw materials get moved to places where they can manufactured quickly with the lowest cost, which is typically places that are not heavily regulated by the government, which is China, Asian countries, other other places like that. But they are very prevalent in an Asian countries. And then they're manufactured there and then shipped to Assembly in the United States so that they can get that made in the US kind of stamp. And then they get they get put on boats or truck trucks across the country. The Inland Empire specifically, which California is like a big supplier to the United States, we prove we you know, we supply 25% of most of the foods that are consumed in the US, we provide a lot of goods that come in on the ports on this side, to the US, but this the Inland Empire does. Supply I think like 50 to 70%, the numbers pretty spread out of all of California. So a lot of a lot of goods get brought in to Long Beach or LA ports. They get put on trucks, and then the trucks drive from LA or Long Beach, to the Inland Empire, where communities they're fighting to maintain the residential communities because warehouses are being popped up so fast. And so you have a lot of people in positions of governmental power, just constantly approving developers to build and build more warehouses. So you have school schools, hospitals and homes right next to and surrounded by warehouses that their sole purpose is to store materials anticipating you to click Buy. And the biggest corporates in that area are Walmart, Target and Amazon. And so when you look at the the what is happening is the problem is the storage and the breakdown of the residential communities because now you have people who can't afford to live and or work there, they need to sell their homes and they're being bought up at rapid rates by warehouses and then the warehouses all of a sudden appear within months of time, and we're talking about football fields were at the warehouses. I think we had said that in the video. And the the problem that's impacting the health of those communities is as these trucks they're coming in, I mean, y'all we buy really a lot in this country. So we need to be supplying and keeping these warehouses fully stocked in order for them to be efficient so that you can get it the next day, if that's what you choose, which a lot of people do tend to go that route specifically when Amazon gives it out so freely. And so in order to do that, we have to have trucks constantly coming and going from the ports in LA and in Long Beach down to the Inland Empire. And so what that means is that you have a lot of trucks in idle around the warehouse is waiting to unload and offload, you have a lot of trucks coming in, which are sitting in traffic, because they remind you all this is a heavily trafficked area, because there's been also a lot of push from the posts, Great Depression, to have people in Los Angeles consume more and more cars. And so there's just like, it's saturated. And then you have a lot of homes that are still built, that are still living along side these freeways, because the Inland Empire is a big Cross of many different interstates and highways, and the trucks are stuck in traffic. And so you have communities there that are lowering their life expectancy from like up to 1010 or 15 years, we're seeing a lowering and life expectancy because of respiratory complications like asthma, cancer, other other illnesses, and there isn't enough solutions to this problem. You know, it's very common there that people have respiratory conditions. I think in my work there, I will say from the start of this movie, from the start of this video, to completion and release, which got delayed because of COVID. But it ended up being about a year, a year, a little over a year, there was from everybody we interviewed, there was about, I want to say three deaths of relatives in the area from parents, two siblings, just one year. And these are just a microscale of people that we interviewed. And that just shows if you look at that at the larger scale, there's probably a lot of deaths happening in those communities. So yeah, that's that's the scheme of it, it's a lot of it is the logistics of how to get your goods to you. That is hurting people's health. And then if you look at the larger scope, assembling and creating those goods, is what's causing global greenhouse emissions that's causing climate change. So it's really addressing it on the place where we feel the most empowered to which is stopped demand. Cool.

John Fiege 

Well, and and there's been a crazy twist to the story. Since you made that amazon video I saw on the news, that the Center for cultural power received one of these large donations from Mackenzie Scott during her giving spree in the wake of a divorce from Jeff Bezos. So how do you how do you wrap your head around that one?

Layel Camargo 

Well, it was funny, because when we got the announcement that Mackenzie sky had given over $10 million dollars over to the Senate for cultural power. Our deputy director was like an even though we made that video against Amazon. She still came to us. I'm like, maybe she gave it to us because he made the

husband.

Layel Camargo 

Yeah.

John Fiege 

So funny. Yeah.

Layel Camargo 

I mean, I think I think what that speaks, what that made me think of was that if you're passionate about something, you shouldn't let any politics or economic interest. stand in your way if it's in the service of creating a better humanity and not hurting anybody else.

John Fiege 

Because if they're screwing over your community, they might also be screwing over their wife who leaves them and gives away all their money. Yeah, I'm so grateful for that. It's great. It's the layers of complexity and and irony and humor are hard to hard to fathom. So recently, you launched a podcast called while you recently I think you wrapped up the first season of the podcast. And it's called giving go too far. And you co host it with Trey Vasquez in I love the podcast. It's it's an enormous amount of fun. And your movement from video into podcasting also, of course, reminds me of my own kind of trajectory of looking for new ways to expand and deepen important conversations beyond film and video. And you cover so much ground in the podcast which shows on everything from pandemic parenting to liberated communities, to my personal favorite, a beautiful show on fashion and queer, queer ecology Can you tell me how you got into podcasting and and how it's related to the other work? You do like the videos?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah. First off, congratulations on this podcast, john. Oh, thank you glad that you made this shift even if it is for short term or however long. Yeah, well, thank you for helping I AF course, I think that I've always been really passionate about just telling a story and movement generation who is the executive producer of the podcast, we had been thinking about how I could support them in creating some content in order to get their just transition framework out. And so I was coming in already with a lot to compete with is they had executive produced web series called the North Pole show, led by Josh Healy. And they, you know, Edie eventually made it to second season. And by then Rosario Dawson had also been co executive producer. So I was kind of coming in and being like, oh, man, I don't know if I can create something as amazing as that. And at the same time, I was really excited about the challenge. And so we got had a few ideation meetings where we talked about what was important for them to tell. We're pretty politically aligned. And we care about the same social issues, they're a little bit more focused on the ecological justice of it, which makes it a little difficult because a lot of people don't understand how to make the cross between climate justice and ecological justice, which is very much just like mimicking the way that the natural world is being heard and or responding that can help us think through solutions towards climate justice. And a, you know, we identified a few people who wanted to be involved Trey Vasquez being one of them. And then Alan toy who's also a collective member. And we had several meetings where we just thought through like, what what are some of the things we want to talk about. And movement generation is great at putting out pedagogy at bringing fact and community amplification to solutions and understanding the climate crisis in the environmental crisis at a more digestible scale that isn't so scientific and based on carbon economics, or carbon marketing, or any anything that has to do with global greenhouse, they actually barely talk about greenhouses when they teach about what's happening on the planetary scale. And I always love that about them, they make it so accessible. And so I was really hoping that the podcast could be the mixture of accessibility that they bring, as well as the humor that I like to bring. And just the reality that a lot of people are really just trying to get schooled. Like, I think during the pandemic, people had time to really sit down with some of these complicated thoughts that we haven't really necessarily been able to think of. So we did it all in horizontal fashion, because they are a horizontal, collective. So we had different people who would approve certain themes. And then we had everybody to ultimately at the final decision table, just being able to give their stamp of approval. But we started by creating kind of a list of topics, we did some hybrids, so the query colleges and fashion was a hybrid one. And we started identifying people we wanted to highlight in the community that we're doing amazing work. And then we just started pairing up the themes, and everybody was approving and giving their opinions throughout all of it. And it was really rewarding. I, one of the things that I've been able to do, from translate from film over to work, from video over to podcasts is this collaborative nature that is possible with creating content that isn't actually very easy to do, especially when you have a vision, but that I always find it as a fun challenging thing is how do I get other stakeholders, other people who care about me care about creating and who don't have necessarily all the skills, but they have a story to be told, how do I make it easy. And so for them, podcasting was the easy way to go about it. And I was excited. I'd already co hosted a smaller podcast with the Center for cultural power. When it was culture strike, we went to 12 episodes. And then we ended it was most more focused on current events and kind of more of a talking. And this one was really more of a preparation, like what was the story we were going to tell with three points we want to make sure the audience got, who did we want to highlight? And how did we want to work on it. So we also hired an all woman podcast production company called we rise. And they helped with editing and social media amplification. And they, you know, they they're very passionate about the issues we were talking about as well. So they occasionally with throwing a few of their creative ideas on how to speed things up. So it was overall very rewarding. And how I made the switch was that it just made sense. We were in a pandemic, people were very tuned in to having more of a connection and it was really timely when we started planning for this was about About six months prior to the pandemic, and then we contemplated just making it about current events and releasing it sooner than later. But we ultimately agreed that the issues and the themes we were trying to hit were merited giving such good attention. So if you haven't listened to it, I recommend you do. It's called did we go too far? And I think it's just a good way to get some information and to also get a little a little chuckles and giggles over, you know, about some things that are kind of difficult to digest at times.

John Fiege 

Yeah, totally. And, and just transition is a key issue you address in the podcast? Can you talk about what just transition is and and how you think that term has been used or misused or appropriated in environmental spaces?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah. So just transition comes from thinking through the green economy. And traditionally, it was created for labor workers to be able to discuss, being able to shift from a crony extractive economy over to one that's green that protects jobs that is a little bit more holistic when it comes to addressing just work and jobs and what's needed for a green economy or for something that's like more environmentally aligned. There's a few group of like social justice activists that care about climate justice and the environment who kind of took it one step further, which is that if we do want to just transition that does honor people's labor that we have to look at it a little bit more in detail. And so they coined and or potentially amplified more of the talking about what we currently have, which is the extractive economy, which relies on this, like extract, create, burn, dump kind of mentality of how our economic system works, and that's in a forest through militarism. And that works towards the concentration of wealth and power, at the scale, which has created, you know, a lot of the narratives around the 1%. So they coined that whole system, which is the one that we currently live in economically, which is called the extractive economy. And then they are envisioning a new world for us, which is the acquainting the regenerative economy. And so in the regenerative economy like sacredness and wellness is at the center, the labor sector is more cooperative and collectivized, there's more decision making that is drawn down to the local level. So allowing people to be making more decisions around like what's happening in their environment, and being able to dictate things that are more ecologically aligned. And and, you know, it there's like a upcycled system of how we create and use things that can be returned back to the earth, it's like pretty holistic, I think it's pretty awesome, which is why I lean towards talking about it, I think that just transitions are often used as like, we need just need to move away from fossil fuels, we need to invest in green economies. And when it stops at that scale, and it doesn't look at the way that the current labor sector is set up. Like for example, whether it's like a CEO or president or somebody who like friends, a whole company, and then you have other laborers underneath them that it's more likely for there to be a margin of failure margin of harm on the planet, because it's the actual people who work to land who extract the raw materials who run the companies who can be able to be able to inform and are realigned to sustainable practices. So I think the just transition framework is has evolved now where you have a lot more organizers and activists talking about now just recovery as well as like, when there's a hurricane, can we potentially get support not only on the food aid or initial Red Cross aid, but also like how do we look at the current infrastructure and how when the next hurricane hits, it's going to put us in the same position versus how do we adapt so that the negative impacts that has on communities are actually minimal. And so I think that the just transition is about centering the impacts that certain people are having to to the large global economy that we live in. And where it originated from is basically how it gets kind of CO opted is just thinking about it as kind of like let's create green jobs and that's going to fix everything. It's it that's that's not actually going to be the solution creating just green jobs. We need to look at how are the materials being extracted, how are they being democratized and the way that they're being put back in the hands of the people who are using them to the people who are selling them and how Do we approach the actual green economy in a way where maintenance is at the center where people who are actually using certain new technologies that we need to rely on, actually know how to repair them. So they minimize the waste cycle, it increases the empowerment of the community to be able to reuse versus dump and have to get a new one, which increases the power of corporate interests. So I think just transition is about doing something that's a little bit more holistic, that centers a new world, which is about being in reciprocity and regeneration with the planet and are you can eco ecosystems and their economic models mimic that. And I think that we can do it. I think that that's why I'm a big champion for and I love to talk about that.

John Fiege 

And do you? Do you see tension in conversations or spaces you're in? Around kind of what the implications of that term like how, how systemic or holistic or radical it is, versus, you know, because I do feel like there's this sense that if we just switch to electric cars and solar panels, everything's gonna be fine from so many different, so many different parts of the media and different entities and groups and interests. And it I feel like it's becoming, it's becoming even more problematic.

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, I definitely think that the tensions are there. I yeah, I think that there just hasn't there's there's certain folks who I've been in this is happening as frequent as much as probably because I'm in a lot of like, black indigenous PLC, like folks who intersect labor union organizing with like climate justice organizing, like that. It's less pervasive for me. But there is that a few times where I've popped on calls with just other community members who just want to chat and or potentially talk about collaborating. And it's like, oh, you're talking about just transition from such a different way that I haven't. So the, the narrative hasn't fully evolved. And I think a lot of that evolution is due to just how we haven't been really mixing as a group of people as organizers is I think that there's still this concentration of resources with the big green tops like Greenpeace like 350 dot org. And that, because there isn't that people centered approach that a lot of grassroots organizations that are actually thinking about the regenerative economy in a way that it serves the frontline communities that they're in day to day relationship with that that hasn't necessarily translated on the practical note. So a lot of folks can't really talk about it. But I do feel like it's just about moving away from talking about a just transition that's solely focused on energy consumption and alternatives to energy consumption, to really looking at the scale that like, as a first world country, we actually consume a lot of energy. And so we have to, at some point, come to the reckoning that we need to lower our consumption of energy that maybe we do not need to be watching TV 10 hours a day, or being on computer eight to 10 hours a day. That that is something that we're gonna have to come to recognize. And I think that will be instigated by values that are aligned with a regenerative economy, which is really about lessening the suffering of a few and increasing the wellness of many. And I think that in that spirit, people who just think that surviving this climate crisis is about having carbon drawdowns or carbon sequestering or making sure that everybody has solar panels on their roofs is not going to be the only solution. And that's that's just nature is going to let us know that. And it's going to be facilitated as well by a lot of big top green organizations just relinquishing their access to large amounts of resources and redistributing them to grassroots movements. But the tension is there, but it's not so big. I think it's the the tension is around, like the clarity of what it just transitioned on a holistic level could look like,

John Fiege 

right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's complicated, because the simple understanding of just transition is an essential element of the more the more systemic conception of it, you know, it's not like, you're against solar panels, you know? It can't stop there. And another thing I hear you say a lot on the podcast is, I don't know, which I read as a powerful political statement in a world where all kinds of people claim to know what's what's the importance of humility. And of being honest about not having the answers, and and how how do you see that approach to the world, in contrast to other approaches that you might encounter out there?

Layel Camargo 

Just that the level of humility, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of us, needing to just like, really understand the level of slowing down, that's going to be necessary in order for us to create, for example, a new regenerative economy or a new political system, it's going to require us to really slow down, be humble and kind of realign and discard the values of that instigate greed, individualism. And that shifts us over more to collective well being. That that is at the core of I think what I'm wanting to do is I'm wanting to use storytelling in order for people to feel empowered to be able to look at the core values that colonization and white supremacy has written on, such as greed and individualism, and to start to challenge those in small to big ways. Because we need to rewrite our whole story as a nation that is causing a lot of havoc. And I think that's one of the pieces that when I was talking about instigating more complexity in this movement that is dear to my heart is what are the core values that are actually hurting? They're actually hurting our, our system, they're actually hurting the planet that we need to shift.

John Fiege 

Yeah, do you? Do you feel like a lot of people have trouble saying I don't know.

Layel Camargo 

I think they do. Plug in my computer for a second. Okay.

Oh, okay. Oh,

oh, I didn't see that.

John Fiege 

Okay.

Gotcha.

Layel Camargo 

I like can I just answer from that point, john, if that makes sense.

John Fiege 

Okay. Do you want me to join me to ask the question again? Yes. Okay. Great. So I'll just, I'll just back up for a second. So another thing I hear you say a lot on the podcast is, I don't know, which I read as a powerful political statement in a world where all kinds of people claim to know, what's the importance to you have of humility and being honest about not having the answers? And how do you see that approach to the world in contrast to other approaches you might encounter out there?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, I think we discuss this on the first episode is that I, we are like pretty saturated as like a human species to just have to say that we have a solution or that we know what we're doing. And I think it's like, in our ancestral ways, where it's like, rooted to actually slow down, observe the seasons, look at the pace of the earth and be able to be like, Oh, yeah, actually, let's just sit in contemplation about this big area where we don't have a certain answer. And so in the first episode, we covered that idea that like, yeah, that's a larger mainstream ideology of like, needing to have solutions to their problems, or needing to have answers to questions that may feel daunting. And in the first episode, we kind of sat with that of how that has seeped into our social movements or social justice movements, that even when we are fighting a big crisis, we are still carrying the same values that have dominated our American Society for lack of like, you know, just thinking about it at a bit of a national scale, which are like individualism and greed that have really pushed us to feel like we have to create solutions. And when we're looking at something as big as the climate crisis, it's actually in the practice of slowing down that not only are we going to find solutions, but we're going to be actually practicing this solution which a lot of why we're exasperated. The, you know, there's the tension and the pressure that we're putting on the planet that's causing this this large symptom and reaction is because we're moving at such a fast pace that in the slowing down and trying to find more holistic and diverse solutions. is where we'll be able to thrive. And so I think that there's a bit of an ego problem in this country. And I think in first world countries where everybody wants to be right, everybody wants to lead in the technology that's going to quote unquote, save us. And everybody wants to have all the solutions that are going to be spread at a global scale. And that is a symptom of value. And the belief that we've all inherited from white supremacy. Yeah.

John Fiege 

Yeah, it's, it's, it's something that I feel like, you know, I work at a university. You know, talk about a group of people who think they know the answers to things. Yeah, it's, it's so woven into everything. So another video you made recently is called a grief letter to COVID, which combines a poem of yours read by several people with images from Oakland, San Francisco and LA, I think, and many beautiful moving portraits of people in the community wearing masks, could could you read this poem and tell me a bit about the story behind it, and particularly how the COVID pandemic has informed your work and your understanding of what we face with other cascading crises?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, maybe I'll start up by reading it. Yeah. That'd be great. Okay, so I wrote this, and I'll speak a little bit more about why but it's called the grief letter to COVID COVID you ravaging monster? If you could? Please listen. I don't know why the universe brought you to us and somehow in a sick way I feel like we needed you. Do I need to thank you. You've been taking on a bigger beast you keep showing us who's really to blame that even in a crisis we are last to be protected last to be seen last to be vaccinated hit first hit hardware Hit, hit hit COVID You are our wake up call. You are reminding us that no matter what we need to save us care for us we've got us COVID you literal virus you spread and no see land or distance is a barrier for you. Stop taking our family stop taking my loved ones they have we familia and impasse. Why do you let them die alone? COVID. We're done. This is a grief letter, a breakup letter. We're breaking up with you. We're breaking up with the system's keeping us down. This abusive relationship needs to stop. We will draw tarot cards cast protection spells and pray. Oh God, how we have prayed for work done. Take this as a warning, a warning to the greedy a warning to the premises warning to the systems that be we are done being seen last, we are done being ignored. We demand vaccinations. Now we demand health care now we demand pay to stay home COVID slow us all down to that so that our loved ones can recover so that we can curve the spread so that we can fight for more vaccines. This is our last call COVID go away to where you come from. And while you're at it, take the greed take the racism take the in justices to us our kinship and our planet. Take everything that isn't working. Sincerely, the people who are sick of this s**t. So I started to write this ad was kind of like an artist residency. At the time, my aunt and my uncle and Mexico were fighting to survive co COVID, which they did, thankfully. And then I had an uncle who was in the ICU. And I think I had just found out that he passed away. My uncle who passed away was African American. And you know, it just the statistics were coming up around how prevalent COVID was in the black community. And then shortly after, while I was writing this, I wrote the first draft I wrote it around around that time and when I was doing edits, my cousin got COVID I had another cousin who got COVID and then my grandmother sister passed away from COVID from respiratory complications. And I was just really enraged. I was pissed off that this was happening to my community and that I wasn't surprised because my family is you know, first generation first generation migrant people of color. And my family they're all frontline workers, you know, working restaurants working, janitorial services, and My sister was a frontline worker, she's a nurse, and every other week, it was like, Oh, I could potentially have COVID. So she was quarantining, like, at least once a month, from coming home from work. And she has two kids. And I was going back and forth between being in San Diego to help with childcare to being up to Northern California. And I was sitting in my, you know, 300 square foot apartment when I was there, and just like feeling so relieved that I felt so safe. And at the same time when I would leave, just feeling so scared of potentially getting in this is pre vaccination, and the rollout was happening of the vaccination. And then there was more anti vaccine rhetoric that was being spreading that was spreading in migrant communities and eventually, in a lot of black communities. And so when we were starting to, when we were starting to produce this and turn it into a video was when the vaccine rollout was like, just at eyesight. And I this felt important for me to write because I was upset, I was pissed off. But what I loved about the time and quarantine was that I got to isolate and I got to really sit and care about the things that I wanted. I grew my garden beds, from two beds to six beds, I was harvesting a lot from the land that I lived on at the time. And I was spending more time at home was go I started hiking. I actually hiked I think I ended up hiking at most like 14 miles that one go about 2000 elevation and increase. I was featured on a podcast because I picked up hiking and I was feeling really healthy. I was cooking at home three times a day. And all this is happening while my relatives are sick. And I'm sure that they had some positives as well of like, not not needing to stay home and also the negatives of the economic disparity, I was fortunate enough that I could work remotely. And so I wrote this because it was like being in COVID, at the height of it really highlighted that all these systemic disadvantages were all made up, a lot of us were being asked to stay home, the government was doing some rollouts around, you know, some of the ways that they were financially compensating people to see how much was not enough and not anything close to what people were losing. And then at the same time, we were seeing women of color being let go of jobs and losing jobs at the highest rate. So it was a combination of processing that information. And then the piece around the piece that I wrote around, like, I take everything with you that isn't working like greed and racism was my attempt at being like when COVID goes away, I want this world to be reset. And this like to protect our kinship and our planet and allow for these injustices to go away was in me highlighting that COVID wasn't eco logical crisis like we have extracted from the planet at such high rates so much that we're going so much more deeper into wildlife that has not had contact with humans that were coming into contact with other viruses. And if we do not slow down our extraction rates, we're going to have more and more pandemics like these happening. And as the variants continue, it's going to just keep mutating and potentially have larger effects that were unaware of. And so this was a way of me processing that in that at the systemic scale. I just wanted to let people know that we needed to stop extracting from the earth in the way that it was and that as people we were done, we're fed up with the ways that we've been systemically disproportioned and used to harm the planet. And so the, you know, the sincerely the people who are sick of this s**t is like a call of solidarity for black indigenous and people of color for us to just have a voice. But it was a very powerful piece. And I'm grateful that the Center for cultural power allowed me to turn it into a poetry video.

John Fiege 

Yeah, it's really beautiful. You know, listening to you talk about it reminds me you know, that a decade or so ago I got cancer is really bad cancer almost died. But you know what, when I first got it, and I kind of like entered this kind of cancer culture in a way and start reading a bunch of stuff, I kept seeing this expression that people would say, as cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me. And when I first had the beginning of this whole experience, I just remember thinking like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And by the end of the cancer experience, and I did survive, which is a key part of it, but I understood it all of a sudden, were it's not something you would ever wish on anyone, but it does so much work to reveal the fissures in the fractures in the in the The the assumptions that you're making in life and and the things that were always there that you didn't necessarily see. And I, I don't know, your poem makes me think a lot about that in relation to COVID. And how, with all the terrible things that COVID is, it's it's also an opportunity to see the world differently. Possibly in ways you haven't seen it before, but possibly just to, to to refocus on what you already knew. And and seeing, like, even more how important it is.

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, that's a powerful connection, john. Yeah.

John Fiege 

Yeah. And, you know, reminds me a bit of Arundhati Roy's essay. Did you see you see that? a pandemic is a portal? And she talks about? I don't think I've read it yet. Yeah, she talks about how the pandemic is a portal is an opportunity to enter another world. And there's that question, of course, like, what world are we going to enter when we go through this portal? But regardless, it's an opportunity to enter something else. But yeah, well, I love your your poem, and the piece you made is really beautiful. So thank you for, for reading that again, here. Of course, my pleasure. So we're wrapping up, and sorry about all the delays. But I just have a couple more questions. You could keep going for a few more minutes. Let's do it. All right. So going back to young Lyle, growing up in San Diego, how has your thinking changed since then, about who you are about your relationship to the rest of life on the planet?

Layel Camargo 

I mean, I would say it's changed pretty drastically. I I think that young me was just really absorbed in the world that I lived in, which I think happens to a lot of us and the fact that like I wanted, I had dreams of having a family and having a connection with, you know, the people that I loved and cared and career that like fueled my heart. And now that I'm older, I'm realizing that like, what I at my core wanted was as a young person was I wanted purpose, value and meaning in life. And that I found, I could summarize that, in that way through these accomplishments that I saw for myself as a child based off of what I thought you had to do. And now that I'm older, and I think specifically coming out as queer, and definitely jumping into more understanding, like my role in the larger eco ecological crisis is that the possibilities of what finding meaning and purpose and value is, is actually way more bigger and complex than I can imagine. So I still want those things I want connection with the people that I love, I still want to, you know, have a quote unquote, viable career, which I think really just is my purpose. And my purpose is to tell stories and help create a world where we're in better relationship with the planet. And I feel like I'm doing all those things. And I don't necessarily feel like at my heart to have changed too much actually have this strong line that I kind of go by on a day to day, which is like people don't change people are at the core of who they are and how they were born into the planet of needing to be. And at the same time, I've, how I interpret that and how I choose to practice it. That's the part that has shifted, and a lot of it is through learning about the ways that ancestry what's been eradicated from my history, from my personal, indigenous lineage, and then what's been eradicated from other people's lineages and seeing how I can learn and adapt and be a better person and also looking at where we're headed. I'm contemplating starting a family very soon. And I think a lot about why I want that and then also what are some of the things I need to teach not only my children, but the children that I have close relationship with, and who I want what I want to leave behind if I What if and when I leave this earth and so I feel like a lot of that is rooted on us repairing and making this earth viable for not only myself but the next, you know, seven generations as a lot of indigenous elders like to remind us of and I think that that has changed. I think initially, it was like, have kids have a good home and have a career. And now I think it's like, oh, I actually have a large impact. And I'm choosing to, like, step into that and help create a better place for not myself, but the next generations. And I take that pretty seriously, but also with comedy.

John Fiege 

As you always do, which is fabulous. Yeah, well, I must say, having kids. You know, it made the cancer experience as life changing event seems small. It's a man that it really changes everything about man, it's a it's an experience of facing yourself and who you are and the assumptions you make about the world and, and what you thought you were what you thought your role was, you know, man, I'm going through that my oldest just turned 11. And I, you know, I feel like I'm going through that on a daily basis. Still, you know, it's not like, Oh, yeah, I did. I did that. It took a couple years. I figured it out. It's like, nope. Like, every day is a different. It's a different maze. Navigate. I'm excited for that journey. Yeah, well, good luck. That's it's it's a journey. Gabriela who's listening right now is holding a four month old baby about four months, three months. How old Gabriella? Oh, that's it. It's only been two and a half months. Oh, my goodness. Yes. All right. So at the end of your power to rely on video, we hear from Jade Begay, who is the creative director at at MDN collective, which is an indigenous advocacy organization. She says, We have already survived Apocalypse, we've survived genocide. We've survived settlers colonization, wiping out entire food sources. We've survived biological warfare. And we're here and we're still thriving. The rest of the world and non native folks have a lot to learn. What do you think the rest of the world has to learn about surviving on this planet?

Layel Camargo 

I mean, I think a lot of it is like, everything that we think we're in pursuing of. If you see yourself getting to the finish line and not being fully satisfied, then it's probably like a false solution. I think that we are such a beautiful species like we've evolved to be able to feel to love to care to be smart and intelligent, to build rocket ships to see go to the moon to go to the great depths of the ocean. And yet at the same time, our day to day pursuit is based on a fictionality that is for the economic and political viability of the concentration of wealth and power. And I think that it is such a disservice for us as humans that we spend our day to day on that grind, and we're so dissatisfied, that we can enjoy our families we can enjoy being able to make something with our hands and have the time to do that. And so I think what the rest of society that Jade is kind of alluding to that we need to learn is that we need to be more observant, we need to slow down, we need to be more interdependent, we need to lean into some of those indigenous stories that we are fortunate enough to still have even though colonization tried to eradicate them, and try to learn and apply those in our day to day they're often telling us about how to be in better relationship with each other how to be in better relationship with other animals, how to be in better relationship with plant species with trees, the forest ecosystems, and they're all through storytelling. And I think those wisdoms are the things that a lot of us have lost because of migration A lot of us have lost because of being in a settler colonial country for more than just a handful of generations. And for a lot of, you know, our white relatives is like your whole existence has been a whole system of eradicating other people's cultures and that that is a large healing that we're all going to have to come into reality with. And I think that is in our indigenous wisdoms that we still have access to the I think we should all fight our hardest to preserve is where we will learn that realignment that will break the chain that keep us I mean, for lack of better words that keep us like locked into a system that is exploiting our bodies just so that somebody else could have a third, fourth, or fifth vacation home. And that like what justice does that do when your children are at home, needing help with homework, and you can even take 10 to 15 minutes from your day to do that, because you're trying to keep up with a mortgage that you've been locked in so that you can keep working, that the whole system has been rigged so that we can use our bodies for that. So I think it's the reclaiming of our bodies in order for us to reclaim our impact and relationship with the earth. I think that's that's a big part of me. Jade is Jade is amazing. And she has so much wisdom. And if you don't know who she is, you should look her up and try to follow her as much as possible. But that's that's what I took from from that statement.

John Fiege 

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the people you've you found and put in your videos are really remarkable group. It's really amazing work that you've done with that. So I've asked you to bring a quotation to read that's been particularly meaningful and your journey in life, could you end the show by reading what you brought and telling the story of its significance to you? Yeah,

Layel Camargo 

so I'm going to pull it up on my emails, I don't miss read it, because I've read it so many times that sometimes I feel like I make up my own interpretation. But the quote is, you want to fly, you got to give up the s**t that weighs you down. And that's by Toni Morrison in the book, Song of Solomon. And the first time I heard this, I was in high school. And I think I was like 15 or 16, at the time, and I was in this terrible rut where I was just like, ditching school every day. And just feeling so dissatisfied. I think that's the year I got a concussion. And I was, as I had mentioned, I was a competitive swimmer. So I wasn't even swimming. And then, you know, I guess I would now understand that as like, I was depressed. And I was sitting in my AP, but I was still an overachiever. Y'all like how I managed, I have no idea. But I was sitting in my AP English, like literature class. And we had to read this book, I hate reading. But my teacher did such a great job at like taking us through the synopsis and the summary of the actual storyline, which is very metaphorical. The book is very, very deep. And I was in such a deep, depressive place that I really connected with it. And I remember when we got to this line, which is one of the characters that were very, like, there's a lot of metaphors around this character talking about wanting to fly, the that, you know, a lot of it was like connected to suicide and depression. And I realize that this line, you want to fly, you got to give up this s**t that weighs you down, just spoke to my spirit, and has I have come across so many other passages that are very equally, equally inspirational. But I always come back to this one, because there's always a situation where I have to give up something in order for me to get to something else. For example, you know, in order for me to get to college, I had to give up what I knew. And I jumped into this place that I had no idea. Most recently I've been, as I mentioned, I've been going back and forth between northern and southern California, and I had to give up my home in Northern California in order for me to be able to have more mobility. I'm in a relationship with somebody who's autoimmune compromised, and she works and lives in Los Angeles. And so because of the pandemic, I had to start making some of those choices. And so I feel like every single situation that I have found myself where it's difficult, even in advocating for the planet, and everything, there's always something that is holding us down, that once we get the consciousness that we need to make a leap to something better that we have to let go of. And to me, this speaks to my whole purpose in serving the planet and everything that I've talked about. Now, it's like to jump into video production, I had to jump into something I didn't know and give up the comfort of, you know, sitting behind my work in order to jump into climate change, I had to shift how I was advocating for better lives for people and leave behind my more active participation in transformative justice. And so I feel like everything is in s**t. Sometimes you have to give it up, but it turns into s**t if you hold on to something that isn't serving you anymore. So I feel Toni Morrison and this quote has always guided me and I want to read more of her books. And sometimes I'll pick up you know, different different books of hers that actually have a lot of them on my bookshelf that I haven't read. But a lot of it is reading visually doesn't work for me audio book is the best. And so I feel like I always want to get into things but If, for some reason this quote is one of the things that whenever I've come across it again, I just want to reread it over and over. And it just shows to me that as a, you know, low income youth who grew up in a disadvantaged community that I didn't have to read a whole book, I just needed to have a connection with a passage in order for me to make great leaps that I don't think would have been possible had I not had this perspective from a woman who really gave herself the opportunity to sit through and be intentional about how she walked around the world and had big impact. And if this that's the impact she had on me, I can't imagine what she did for other black Americans who just needed to see themselves more represented in storytelling.

John Fiege 

Yes, she's absolutely incredible. And do you? Do you think there are some things that weigh you down, like past trauma or abuse, the need to get rid of while there are other things that weigh you down? Like maybe caring for an elderly parent or a stepchild or even a healthy child, and you're better off accepting and dealing with the terms and limitations? On your desires to fly?

Layel Camargo 

Yeah, I mean, I feel like it never it never. I feel like it's about really being expansive with the statement because you know, some of the things that you're asking, I'm like, Oh, yeah, politics of disposability. Like we definitely live in a culture where people are more disposable, or situations are more disposable than others. So like, you'll have, you know, like folks who are in the disability community will talk about how disposable they feel from the economic sector, lack of an employment, and that, like, if we are talking about the misuse of the statement, it would be in like, thinking that you can just throw things and then somehow propel yourself to another level. The reality is, how about you throw your conditioning? How will you throw your perspective? How will you throw the ways in which your value is being challenged in this way, and make adjustments and so I think it's really thinking creatively and approaching this in a way that is the least harmful, I do not believe that. Things can easily just go away. But I feel like if you are dealing with a sick relative, and that is a limitation in your life, it's not about getting rid of the relative, it's about changing your perspective, and maybe growing your community of support. So if you feel like the embraces around the changing and adapting with your conditions, and I have I have this, like posted that I keep by my desk, that says your environment doesn't dictate your your environment doesn't dictate your conditions or your conditions don't. It's like my desk is a mess. I'm like, Where's that post it, but I just keep it around me and it says, My conditions do not dictate my perspective. And so what I really try to bring to myself is like, no matter what's happening externally, I always have options and choices, which is something very powerful for a queer, trans, migrant descent, indigenous descent person to be able to say, in a world where we're constantly being indoctrinated into a system that isn't meant to help us it's meant to hurt us.

John Fiege 

Wow. Well, that's a great place to end. Thank you so much for joining me today. L'Oreal. It's been amazing conversation, as always, with you. Thank you so much.

Layel Camargo

Thanks, John.

Outro

John Fiege

Thank you so much to Layel Camargo. Go to our website at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can find the quotation Layel read from Toni Morrison, plus book and media recommendations, and links to Layel’s video works, and organizations they’ve worked with.

Chrysalis is produced and edited by Gabriela Cordoba Vivas; with music by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas, design by Unai Reglero, and mixing by Morgan Honaker.

If you enjoyed my conversation with Layel, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Contact me anytime at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can also subscribe to our newsletter and support us with a donation.

Lichen is a strange presence on this planet. Traditionally, scientists have understood lichen as a new organism formed through symbiosis between a fungus and an algae. But the science is evolving. It seems that there may be more than one species of fungus involved in this symbiosis, and some scientists have suggested that lichen could be described as both an ecosystem and an organism. Lichen may even be immortal, in some sense of the word.

In lichen, the poet Forrest Gander finds both the mystery of the forest and a rich metaphor for our symbiosis with one another and with the planet, for the relationship between the dead and the living, and for how our relationships with others change us indelibly. In his poem, “Forest,” lichen are a sensual presence, even erotic, living in relationship to the other beings around them. They resemble us, strangely, despite our dramatic differences.

The words of the poem teem with life, like the forest they explore, and Forrest’s marvelous reading of the poem adds a panoply of meanings and feelings through his annunciation, his breaths, his breaks. It’s phenomenal.

This poem, and his work more broadly, is about nothing less that who we are on this Earth and how we live—how we thrive—in relationship.

Forrest Gander writes poetry, novels, essays, and translations. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book, Be With. As an undergraduate, like me, he studied geology, which became foundational to his engagement with ecological ethics and poetics.

Forrest often collaborates with other artists on books and exhibitions, including a project with the photographer Sally Mann. His latest book of poetry is a collaboration with the photographer Jack Shear, called Knot (spelled with a “k”). He recently collaborated with artist Ashwini Bhat on an exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, called “In Your Arms I’m Radiant.”

His poem, “Forest,” is from his 2021 collection of poems, Twice Alive.

Forrest has taught at Harvard University and Brown University. He spoke to me from his home in Northern California, where he now lives.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series, which focuses on a single poems from poets who confront ecological issues in their work.

You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Forrest Gander

Born in the Mojave Desert in Barstow, California, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia. He spend significant years in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), Eureka Springs, and Providence. With the late poet CD Wright, he has a son, the artist Brecht Wright Gander. Forrest holds degrees in both Geology and English literature. He lives now in Northern California with his wife, the artist Ashwini Bhat.

Gander's book Be With was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Concerned with the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, his book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gander has collaborated frequently with other artists including photographers Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, Raymond Meeks, and Lucas Foglia, glass artist Michael Rogers, ceramic artists Rick Hirsch and Ashwini Bhat, artists Ann Hamilton, Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, dancers Eiko & Koma, and musicians Vic Chesnutt and Brady Earnhart, among others.  

The author of numerous other books of poetry, including Redstart: An Ecological Poetics and Science & Steepleflower, Gander also writes novels (As a Friend; The Trace), essays (A Faithful Existence) and translates. Recent translations include It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, Names and Rivers by Shuri Kido, and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems. His most recent anthologies are Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin American (selected by Raúl Zurita) and Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.

Gander's books have been translated and published in more than a dozen other languages. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. In 2011, he was awarded the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship. Gander was the Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University before becoming The Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University where he taught courses such as Poetry & Ethics, EcoPoetics, Latin American Death Trip, and Translation Theory & Practice. He is an Emeritus Chancellor for the Academy for the Academy of American Poets and is an elected member of The Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Gander co-edited Lost Roads Publishers with CD Wright for twenty years, soliciting, editing, and publishing books by more than thirty writers, including Michael Harper, Kamau Brathwaite, Arthur Sze, Fanny Howe, Frances Mayes, Steve Stern, Zuleyka Benitez, and René Char.

“Forest”

By Forrest Gander

Erogenous zones in oaks

Recommended Readings & Media

Forrest Gander reading his poem “Unto Ourselves” from Twice Alive.

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege

Lichen is a strange presence on this planet. Traditionally, scientists have understood lichen as a new organism formed through symbiosis between a fungus and an algae. But the science is evolving. It seems there may be more than one species of fungus involved in this symbiosis. And some scientists have suggested that lichen, and could be described as both an ecosystem and an organism. Lichen may even be immortal in some sense of the word.

In lichen, the poet Forrest Gander finds both the mystery of the forest and a rich metaphor for our symbiosis with one another and with the planet, for the relationship between the dead and the living, and for how our relationships with others change us indelibly. In his poem, "Forest," lichen are an essential presence, even erotic, living in relationship to the other beings around them. They resemble us strangely, despite our dramatic differences.

The words of the poem teem with life, like the forest they explore, and Forrest's marvelous reading of the poem as a panoply of meanings and feelings through his enunciation—his breaths, his breaks; it's phenomenal.

This poem in his work, more broadly, is about nothing less than who we are on this earth, and how we live; how we thrive in relationship.

I'm John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series.

Forrest Gander writes poetry, novels, essays, and translations. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book Be With.

Forrest often collaborates with other artists on books and exhibitions, including a project with a photographer Sally Mann. His latest book of poetry is a collaboration with a photographer Jack Scheer called Knot. He recently collaborated with artist Ashwini Bhat on an exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, called In Your Arms I'm Radiant.

His poem, "Forest," is from his 2021 collection of poems, Twice Alive.

Forrest has taught at Harvard University and Brown University. He spoke to me from his home in Northern California, where he now lives.

Here is Forrest Gander reading his poem "Forest."

Poem

Forrest Gander

“Forest”

Erogenous zones in oaks

Conversation

John Fiege

Thank you. It's so wonderful hearing you read it, the intonation and the flow of the words and your emphasis is just like completely new hearing you read it, rather than just reading it myself. I want to start with the sexual imagery. You begin with "erogenous zones in oaks, slung with stoles of lace lichen." And that last line, "stoles of lace lichen the," that was one of the things that jumped out to me, is the is at the end of the line there. And you read it as if it was the end of the line rather than pausing and using it as part of the next stanza. But in addition to these, this erogenous zone, you've got thrusting mushrooms in a layer of spawn, and sexual imagery doesn't often accompany decomposition, and decomposers like lichen and in fungi, but this combination brings a strong sense of the interconnectedness of life and death of reproduction and decomposition. And so this is the cyclical world we live in, even though we're often myopically or delusionally, focused on some kind of progressive, linear, supernaturally immortal view of our lives. How are you imagining the reader encountering the beginning of this poem, and its images of sexually charged decomposition?

Forrest Gander

I'm, uh, trying to connect decomposition and eros, or the merging of more than one species, one individual, into a community. And I'm trying to use a syntax, which you notice, that also doesn't easily separate itself into clear, discrete sentences, but seems to be connected at both ends. And the sense is for us to lose our security in reading our feeling that we dominate the reading that we can figure it out quickly and divide it up into these parcels, and instead, create a kind of reading experience that mimics the kind of experience that we actually live, where everything is connected, and, and where the erotic and the decomposing are involved in the same processes.

John Fiege

Yeah, and thanks to Governor Jerry Brown, lace lichen is now the official California state lichen making...

Forrest Gander

(Chuckles) Isn't that great? 

John Fiege

...making California the first state to recognize a lichen as a state symbol. And the poem, like you were saying, how the syntax is mimicking the organic world. Visually, the line breaks and the varied intended indentations appear as local lace lichen itself. Can you talk about your relationship with lichen?

Forrest Gander

Yes. You know, I think like you think, which is why you're doing these podcasts, that we're in an exigent historical moment where the environment is rapidly changing, and species are rapidly disappearing. And we've been hearing about this for decades without really responding in a sufficient way to the exigency of our situation. So I'm trying to find models of, instead of just heaping on more climate information horror, I'm trying to find models of other ways of thinking about our relationship with the world. And one, since I have a background in science—I have a degree in geology—is a scientific one. And I worked with a mycologist, named Anne Pringle, who taught me to see fungus and lichen in places where I hadn't been seeing them before. And it turns out lichen covers about 92% of the world you can find lichen in. And despite that, most people know what it is. They've seen, like on rocks, green, brown, little spots. It turns out, scientists don't really know what lichen is.

John Fiege

It's cool to find something that scientists don't feel like they know that much about.

Forrest Gander

It is! And yet, it seems like there's more more of those things that we don't really know that we can't measure, that we can't feel like we are in control of it all. And lichen is these two—more actually, it's not just an algae and cyanobacteria, or Sienna bacteria and fungus that get together it there's more organisms that are involved that come together, and are transformed completely and can't go back to what they were. And they formed this new organism that acts completely differently. And we're not so different from that, that our own bodies are full of other organisms, and even our DNA contains DNA of parasites that long ago became incorporated into our system. So lichen gives us a way of thinking about the mutualities that our lives are really made of.

John Fiege

Yeah, and this poem, "Forest," is part of that collection, Twice Alive, where you have "Post-Fire Forest" and other poems related to wildfire and the aftermath of them, and that collection follows on the heels of your previous collection, Be With, which, you know this moving series of eulogistic poems to your late wife. It seems that Be With wrestles with and processes personal grief, while "Twice Alive" adds the element of ecological trauma. How are those two realms of trauma-related phenomena—the personal and the ecological? And how do they play out in the poem?

Forrest Gander

The poems of "Be With”… they are so personally painful to me, I couldn't even read from the book after I published it. I think I read twice and then stopped reading from it. And one, as Albert Camus says, you can't live on in a grief or depression that's so terrible that it doesn't leave you with any openings. And so I wanted to find positive things to write about. But we're living during an ecological crisis. So I'm, and I've been writing about that crisis through really most of my adult life. But I wanted to find positive ways of reimagining our relationship with the world and maybe with death also. Because in lichen, and in the metaphor of like, and work, to two or more things come together and are transformed. I thought of human intimacy and the way that my relationship, my close relationships, I'm transformed in those relationships, I become something else. And that thing, which is welded in love, has a durability, and lasts. And in the same way, scientists—some scientists are saying that our whole idea of death comes out of our mammalian orientation. And that may be because some things don't die, and have theoretical immortality, and lichen, given enough nutrients, may be one of those things.

John Fiege

That's amazing. How does it make you feel to think about the possibility that there's something that actually has some kind of immortality?

Forrest Gander

How does it make us feel? I think it checks what we have always thought we've known. And it checks our instinctual perspective. And that kind of check, I think, is really helpful in terms of how we begin to reimagine our place in a world of other species that are completely different from us, and yet, share so much DNA.

John Fiege

Can you tell me about the Sangam literary traditions that you've referenced as an important element of your recent work in Eco-poetry?

Forrest Gander

Sure! What brought me to Sangam was looking for other models of relationships between the human and the nonhuman. And it turns out that, you know, 2000 years ago, in Southern India, there was a blossoming of literature, which came to be called Sangam, which means convergence, and that one of the two styles of that poetry, which is called Akam, it was considered not only unethical but impossible to write about human emotions, as though they were independent of the landscape around us, which affects our perceptions. And, it impacts how and what we feel. And so, using that model for poems and finding that the same five landscapes that come up in the Sangam poems are the same five landscapes that one can find in California, where I live, I used those Sangam poems as a kind of model for writing poems that expressed that mutuality of, of the human and the nonhuman in the five landscapes of California in my home.

John Fiege

isn't that so satisfying on so many levels to be able to look so far back in history? And to see people encountering the world in ways that are so resonant with the ways you are, we are encountering the world today in a completely different part of the planet, even? It's kind of amazing.

Forrest Gander

It is! And yeah, I think it's what we will find everywhere that, you know, the Native Americans in what we now called the United States. They didn't think that these European invaders would last very long because the European invaders hadn't lived for thousands of years, with animals and plants of this continent. And so they thought we would fail. And we have failed, we've failed to live in a way that takes into account our interdependence with the nonhuman world.

John Fiege

Well, jumping back into the poem, your word choices and juxtapositions and the sounds, and the rhythms of the words in the poem are so powerful. Here's a section that begins at the end of a stanza and carries on to the next, "a force call it nighttime thrusts mushrooms up from their lair." I like this idea of nighttime as a force that has the power to push things up out of the earth. And nighttime is when we rest, but also maybe when we have sex, or maybe when we don't have sex often enough. But how is nighttime of force for you?

Forrest Gander

Because there are so many processes, especially plant processes, that take place after the sun goes down. And that often, we're not thinking about night being a reenergizing process for other species. And also, I'm connecting nighttime, and that darkness with the half-buried to the things that go on in the dark, the things that go on underground.

John Fiege

Right! Well, here's another section I'd like to dig into. If you don't mind me reading, I feel bad reading your poem as you read it so beautifully, but just to go through it again. Like memories, are they or punctuation? Was it something the earth said to provoke a response, tasking us to recall an evolutionary course, our long-ago initiation into the one among others? So in this section of the poem, you shift from third person into first person plural, and we don't exactly know what the 'we' or the 'us' is, but I'm imagining it to be our species collectively speaking with the earth here. I personified a personified Earth. And each of us is merely one among others, one person among other people, but also humans are just one among many other species on the earth. So what's going on here, with the earth being provocative, the shift to first person plural, and to us thinking about our evolutionary course?

Forrest Gander

So I'm thinking of mushrooms as kind of exclamation marks that come up and call our attention to the nonhuman, and also how memories are like that, that they pop up from the darkness of our mind into our conscious mind. And that, what they remind us of, what any contact with a nonhuman reminds us of, is our involvement with them; our long ago initiated course as an interdependent species, as a community in a community, that we are one among many others, as you say, and that if we forget that, then we don't take care of the earth because we don't recognize that it's part of taking care of ourselves. And for many human communities and cultures earlier, this was de rigueur, it was understood that, that we were involved. Our lives were educations in how to live with the world around us. But we've become so separated from that in our urban cultures that we need reminding.

John Fiege

Right, right. Well, and that reminds me of another section of the poem, we have this phrase "newborn noticing." So the stanza it's in is, "and within my newborn noticing, have you popped up beside me, my love? Or were you here from the start?" And I love this idea of newborn noticing it suggests that we're noticing a new, but also noticing, as a newborn does, like Lao says—‘newborn baby, unbiased, undistracted, nonjudgmental.’ And this section feels like it touches on our deeply ingrained, anthropocentrism and ignorance of other species, and maybe how poetry can help us notice the world around us more fully, especially the other-than-human world. What is this 'newborn noticing' to you?

Forrest Gander

Right, I'm so glad you bring up Lao Tzu, also. Lao Tzu says, "Those who are not in constant awe; surely some great tragedy will befall them." And hear the 'newborn noticing,' again, that earlier passage you mentioned, that connects the punctuation to coming out of the ground of the mushrooms, to memories that come out of the darkness of our mind into our conscious mind. That's also the birth of something.

John Fiege

So here's... oh, go ahead.

Forrest Gander

I just like that you've been, I mean, some people ask, you know, what can we do in this environmental crisis, and one of the things we can do is to try to have a chorus of not just scientists and biologists, but a chorus of artists and priests, and poets. And that's what you've been doing: putting together that chorus of responses to our crisis. And I think it's going to take the voices of a lot of people from a lot of different trajectories, to affect any kind of change. So I'm proud of what you're doing.

John Fiege

Yeah, I totally agree. And I'm glad you notice and appreciate that (chuckles). You know, one thing I say all the time is, you know, our environmental discourse is dominated by science, economics, and policy. And those three things are all extremely important, and we have to keep on top of all of them. But it's leaving out the whole rest of the human experience. And if we are not all focused on this problem, and dealing with it in the ways that we know how, and the ways that we know how to interact with the world, we just... we can't get there because the problem is... it's so overwhelming as it is to leave it up to a small portion of the population to address is not sufficient,

Forrest Gander

Right? Or it would have changed already. And I think what art and poetry and literature can do is add a kind of an emotional and psychological approach to it, that can add it to the science, and can be more convincing,

John Fiege

Right? And not even just like, a way to convince people, but just a way to, to understand and feel the problem is so much beyond, you know, just a reason-based problem that you can solve or not, you know, but that it's part of who you are and what you value in the world and what you know, get you up out of bed every morning.

Forrest Gander

That's beautifully put. Yeah, I agree with you.

John Fiege

Well, here here's another line I love from the poem, "A swarm of meaning and decay." And this goes back to that cyclical view of life and death; birth and decomposition. And it also brings in this concept of meaning—this thing that humans are obsessed with. Our perpetual question of why—what is the meaning of life? And so much of the foundation of our understanding of meaning is bound up in the perpetuation of life. And oftentimes, in the avoidance of death, despite the need for death to bring life. Can you talk more about this "swarm of meaning and decay?"

Forrest Gander

So the "swarm of meaning and decay" comes just a moment after my "newborn noticing." And here, the poem merges the human—we don't really know for sure whether I'm talking about human beings, or I'm talking about other forms of life that are emerging from the underworld, like fungus, for instance. And in that merging of subjectivity and world, I'm trying to emphasize how the human life and the processes of the life—lives that aren't human—are completely related to each other. It's interesting to me that the kind of poetry that I write is sometimes categorized as eco-poetry, the idea of Eco-poetry is that there might be a way of writing in which human subjectivity and the non-human aren't so discrete from each other and that we might be able to show in writing, a different way of experiencing, or really, the real way of experiencing our relationships with otherness, which is that our subjectivities merge into otherness. That we're made of multiple creatures and were made by multiple interactions with the world. And I think that's what art has always done, is that it's expanded our way of thinking of the human.

John Fiege

Definitely, definitely. Well, let me jump into the last two stanzas in the poem, which read, "And abundance floods us floats us out, we fill each with the other all morning breaks as songbird over us who rise to the surface, so our faces might be strong." And again, there's so much richness in this language. But to start off with, how does abundance, both flood us and float us?

Forrest Gander

Well, our lives are abundant; the world is abundant. And that sense of merging with another in intimacy, in love, and merging with the world is a sense of expanding. This, you know, the notion of the self, and that's an abundance, it's recognizing our collaborative relationship with otherness. And it floats us out of ourselves so that we're not locked into our own minds, our own singular psyches, we fill with each other. And then again, here, the syntax is working in two ways. We fill with each other, we fill with the other "all morning". And then we revise that as we, as we make that break. We fill with the other "all morning breaks as birdsong over us." And I'm thinking here about how human beings, Homo sapiens, from the start, almost all of human beings have experienced birdsong since we were born, since early in our lives. We've grown up with the songs of birds infused in our minds, in our hearing. And how much of a part of us birdsong is. We're rising to the surface like the mushrooms coming from underground to blossom so that our faces might be sprung. And here again, the human and the nonhuman? Am I talking about mushrooms here? Or am I talking about human beings? I'm purposely talking about both in a way that is perhaps indistinguishable.

John Fiege

And as you mentioned, the poem starts with the imagery of the mushrooms thrusting upward. And then, at the end here, it seems that the we in the poem rises to the surface. And the last line of the poem is, so our faces might be sprung. This sense of emergence comes to that most intimate thing—our faces—and this vague 'we' suddenly has a face. And we are like flowers or emergent mushrooms in the nighttime. Where does this poem leave you? And how do you think about where you'd like to leave the reader at the end?

Forrest Gander

I think in that uncertainty about where the human and where the non-human begins, I think that's the strategy of the poems, which is presenting not some romantic notion of our involvement with others, but I think a form of realism, it's recognizing that our involvement with otherness is entire, that were composed of otherness. So I think the feeling of what a mushroom is, is just the face, it's this little—fruited body, they call it—of an organism that's underground that we don't see at all. And, in a way, that's what our lives are also: this brief flourishing of the face of something that's connected to a body that's much larger than ours. And that ambiguous space is what I'm interested in, in thinking about.

John Fiege

And does that noticing or that knowledge calls us to do something? In particular, do you think?

Forrest Gander  32:43

Well, I don't want to turn the poem into a didacticism. But the poem presents a vision. And that vision can contribute to the way that we see ourselves in the world. And the way we see ourselves in the world forces us to make ethical decisions about how we are and what we do. So in, I want to provide a vision or share a vision. And I want readers to do with it what they feel called upon to do. There have been different ways that we've understood our relationship and our role in a living Earth, through time and in different cultures. And the worldview that we have now, which is using the Earth very transactional, can be changed. And that art can inspire us to imagine those kinds of changes. In some ways, we're like the yeast that gets put with grapes to make wine. The yeast, which is a fungus, eats the sugar, and it secretes basically alcohol. That's what where we get alcohol from, and it proliferates and proliferates, and keeps producing alcohol until at about 13%. The yeast kills itself it dies because it can't live with an alcohol content greater than that. And we're like that yeast on this earth. We’re using up all of the resources, and we're proliferating, and pretty soon, there's not going to be room for us to live on the world will pollute ourselves out of existence, and the world will go on. It's just that we won't be part of it.

John Fiege

That's a beautiful place to end; with yeast, and lichen, and erogenous zones. All swirling around together. Can you end by reading the poem once again?

Forrest Gander

Sure. So, 'forest' is one of the five major landscapes that appear in the Sangam poems.

[See poem as transcribed above]

John Fiege

Forrest, thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

Forrest Gander

Thanks a lot, John. I'm really pleased to be a part of your series and to be part of the chorus of voices that you're putting together.

John Fiege

And it's a beautiful voice that you've brought to it.

Outro

John Fiege

Thank you so much to Forrest Gander. Go to our website at chrysalispodcast.org, where you can read his poem "Forrest" and find our book and media recommendations.

This episode was researched by Elena Cebulash and edited by Brody Mutschler and Sophia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas, mixing is by Juan Garcia.

If you enjoyed my conversation with Forrest, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Contact me anytime at chrysalispodcast.org, where you can also support the project, subscribe to our newsletter, and join the conversation.

Our love for the world around us and our passion for protecting that world can come from many different places. It can come from a connection to the land, or a magical experience we had with other people in a particular place, or our sense of awe from the beauty of the living creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But that love and passion can also come from seeing or experiencing the destruction of the same ecological web, from pollution in the air that rains down onto a playground, or the clearing of a wildlife habitat to make way for a fossil fuel pipeline.

Dave Cortez has been organizing for environmental justice in Texas for the better part of two decades. He lives in Austin now, but the love and passion that guides him came from the Rio Grande, the Sierra Madre Mountains and the high desert of West Texas. And from fighting a copper smelter and other threats to the land, air and water in and around his native El Paso. Dave has a fierce love for his El Paso Community. But cutting his teeth as an environmental justice organizer in his hometown wasn't easy. 

Dave is now Director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, where he’s bringing his El Paso roots and years of experience on the streets and in the communities around Texas to the Sierra Club’s statewide campaigns.

I’ve known Dave for many years and used to regularly attend environmental justice meetings in Austin that he helped organize. I’ve seen him rise from an on-the-ground organizer to the leader of the Texas chapter of one of the oldest and largest environmental organizations in the world.

Our conversation tracks his education as an environmental justice organizer. From the playgrounds of El Paso to the gentrifying neighborhoods of Austin, his story reflects the changing nature of the American environmental movement and the exciting possibilities of more robust connections between community-based frontline environmental justice struggles and the large and powerful environmental organizations with nationwide influence.

You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Dave Cortez

Dave Cortez is a 3rd generation El Pasoan now based out of Austin where he lives with his partner and six year old daughter. He grew up and learned organizing on the frontera, where industrial pollution, poverty, gentrification, racism and the border wall are seen as intersecting issues. Dave serves as the Director of the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, and has been organizing in the Texas environmental movement for 18 years. Dave is supporting staff and volunteers across Texas who are organizing for power by centering racial justice and equity alongside frontline communities directly impacted by polluting industries.

Quotation Read by Dave Cortez

"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective.

We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me – Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.

We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves.

We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about – survival and growth.

Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one of us here is a link in the connection between anti-poor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women, and resurgent violence against Black people. I ask myself as well as each one of you, exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives." - Audre Lorde

Recommended Readings & Media

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege  

Our love for the world around us and our passion for protecting that world can come from many different places. It can come from a connection to the land, or a magical experience we had with other people in a particular place, or our sense of awe from the beauty of the living creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But that love and passion can also come from seeing or experiencing the destruction of this same ecological web: from pollution in the air that rains down onto a playground or the clearing of wildlife habitat to make way for a fossil fuel pipeline.

Dave Cortez has been organizing for environmental justice in Texas for the better part of two decades. He lives in Austin now, but the love and passion that guides him came from the Rio Grande, the Sierra Madre mountains, and the high desert of West Texas—and it came from fighting a copper smelter and other threats to the land, air, and water in and around his native El Paso. Dave has a fierce love for his El Paso community but cutting his teeth as an environmental justice organizer in his home town wasn’t easy.

Dave Cortez  

Two of my close family members worked at the plant. My dad's brother worked at the plant and then worked at Chevron on the other side of town. And then his brother in law, worked at the plant and retired. And here I was, this younger punk, you know, sort of just not super close to the family, showing up at events and they asked what I'm doing and, oh, they think I'm a paid protester, you know, forget my education, forget what's at what I'm actually saying. You know, it's, deep cultural assimilation. It's deep colonization, sort of this Stockholm syndrome that develops out of poverty and repression. It's horrific, and it's sad to watch. People fiercely defend the only thing that has helped them in their eyes and not be able to acknowledge the harm that's been done. It's not different from, you know, addiction in that way, or depression.

John Fiege  

Or domestic abuse. 

Dave Cortez  

Exactly. It's heartbreaking. It still hurts me to talk about. 

John Fiege  

I’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis.

Dave Cortez is now Director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, where he’s bringing his El Paso roots and years of experience on the streets and in the communities around Texas to the Sierra Club’s statewide campaigns.

I’ve known Dave for many years and used to regularly attend environmental justice meetings in Austin that he helped organize. I’ve seen him rise from an on-the-ground organizer to the leader of the Texas chapter of one of the oldest and largest environmental organizations in the world.

Our conversation tracks his education as an environmental justice organizer. From the playgrounds of El Paso to the gentrifying neighborhoods of Austin, his story reflects the changing nature of the American environmental movement and the exciting possibilities of more robust connections between community-based frontline environmental justice struggles and the large and powerful environmental organizations with nationwide influence.

Here is Dave Cortez.

Conversation

John Fiege

Well, you grew up in El Paso in Far West Texas, and it's right on the border of Mexico and New Mexico. Can you tell me a bit about growing up there, and your family and how you saw yourself in relationship to the rest of nature.

Dave Cortez  

I've got a little picture I'm looking at my my very first demonstration. It's a bunch of kids, kids meaning college kids, my my age at the time, about maybe 22, 23, and a big peace flag and we're hanging around what was called Plaza de Los Lagartos, Plaza of the Alligators. And we're there I think we're protesting, must have been continuing invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, but you know, I keep it up. And I keep pictures of the mountains of West Texas, the edge of the Rockies is what cuts into the central central part of El Paso, the Franklin Mountains. And then you have the Rio Grande, the heart and soul of that land. And on the other side of the river, those mountains continue into the Sierra Madres all the way down to the coast. It's majestic. It's, you know, that land is as colonized as is its people. You know, it's been, the river has been dammed up upstream in New Mexico, and two reservoirs to provide water for agriculture and farming and things like that, recreation. It was the only area of water that we we had access to when I was a kid. We would drive up to Truth or Consequences and load up on nightcrawlers and whatever other tackle and bait, and then take my dad's car and drive along somewhere, find a good spot. And fish from the shore for a couple of days at a time, camp, and, you know, that was a desert lake. It was wild for me, because we didn't have water, you know.

John Fiege  

So tell me about what you did. 

Dave Cortez  

Well, we would just go up there. That was, that was our place to go get get access to water, you know, away from the desert, you know, growing up in El Paso, you just, it's It's dry, it's desert, we get, we used to average nine inches of rain a year, it's down now, you know, but the Rio was, it's always been sacred and it was special, it was a place you could go and see water. Not all year round, but most of the year and see it flowing and you look in any direction, away from the mountains, and you can see what feels endless, but it's actually you know, two or more hundred miles to the horizon, you see Thunder heads 30, 40, sometimes 45 or 50,000 feet high way far away, you think maybe you hope maybe those might come your way, maybe we'll get lucky and get a little bit of rain. Most times they don't. But with that sometimes you're blessed with the outflow that carries the smell of creosote, a native plant in the region that everybody's come to call the smell of rain. And, you know, even if you don't actually get the rain yourself, you might get some of those breezes and some of that wonderful smell. And it's, it's life giving, it's restorative. As a kid, you know, I was fortunate that my family made an effort to take us out into the desert quite a bit, we would go chase storms, we would watch lightning, my father would turn the AM radio to a blank station so we could hear the the lightning on the radio, the static pop. And we got a real kick out of that and we'd go off roading and find spots and park and you know, just hang out. And that was a pretty common thing for a lot of folks around town is just to get out into the desert. You know, my my heart and soul and my spirit is connected to that land, it is part of that land, I draw strength from those mountains, from that river. I worry about moving further away, what that might do to me, how how that might be a strain. Even just being here in Austin 600 miles away, it feels very far. You know, my family was middle class, I call it 80s middle class. And, you know, both my parents worked. I have two older siblings. And you know, we were all in public school and doing our thing. You know, everything seemed, you know, like The Wonder Years kind of situation. And you know, you don't when you're young, if you're fortunate, you don't see a lot of the issues around you. It wasn't until my teens, my parents split. And I was living with my mom and started to see a lot more other sides of life, some of the struggles, and just kind of notice more about the town, about the culture. But it was really when I moved back to El Paso after college, here in Austin at St. Edward's, where I studied political science and philosophy and environmental policy. When I moved back, it all started to come together how much I missed, how much I was removed from about my community and my culture in my youth. You know, so the language is the biggest example. We did not speak Spanish in my family. It was something my parents spoke to each other when they needed to talk about something that we didn't need to know about as kids. 

John Fiege  

Right, right. 

Dave Cortez  

You know, we didn't know about our indigeneity we weren't raised around that, we didn't know about the cultural connection to the land. I think in some way the spirit in my family drew us towards it. We would go spend time around those things, but we didn't really have conversations about it. And the biggest thing I didn't know about was how heavily polluted and contaminated the air was growing up. I tell a story about going into middle school. This time I was in in private school and Catholic school. Just being out on the playground it's a you know, concrete schoolyard kind of situation. And you run your hand on the on the railing and there's yellow chalk-like stuff and you don't think twice about it because it's like chalk. Or it's dust. Well, you know, in that part of town, downtown El Paso, it's because of the copper smelter. We had a 110 year old lead and copper smelting operation called Asarco that was less than two miles away from where I was going to school. And you know, you move on, maybe, you're a kid, maybe you wash your hands, maybe you don't. And it just, you know, when I moved back, I thought of that--I thought of all the times, I used to play in the dirt, like every other kid in El Paso does, you know, you don't got Barton Springs to go to or Greenbelt Creek, you play in the dirt, dig tunnels, and that stuff gets in you. And that's loaded with heavy metals, arsenic, cadmium, lead, you name it. It was it was a huge shock for me to learn that the land that I was around as a child, and the air that I was around as a child was just heavily contaminated. And I knew nothing about it. 

John Fiege  

But what was the experience like when you were actually in college and getting more heavily into activism? Like what was motivating you? And how did you see yourself in relationship to other folks?

Dave Cortez  

Right on. Well, I can't leave out that the reason I came to Austin was because of my older brother and my older sister. I had never seen green, like this town, when I came to visit my sister in the summer. So I just was blown away, everything was green, there was water, it rained, I just felt like an oasis and I wanted to come here. So I went to St. Ed's, which ended up being, you know, expensive as hell, but really cool in the sense of, you know, an opportunity to learn, to be away from home. You know, and so, I didn't really know what to make of this town when I was here. I didn't know what to make of the people, the students, but by the grace of the Creator, in serendipity, I was thrown into a class on social movements. And that's a study in the 1960s. And so, you know, I developed a really foundational experience learning about the broader politic of American civil society, in that case, which blossomed into deeper learning around political theory and rhetoric, dating all the way back to some of the Greek philosophers, and modern day political thinkers, but I really got a ton of wild information into my head. In 2006, it wasn't here in Austin. It was on North Padre Island. The Austin Sierra Club was organizing a trip, there was a woman I liked at the time. And we were were fancying each other and were like, "Hey, let's go camping. I don't know what a crawfish is. But they're doing a crawfish boil. And they say they're going to clean up the beach." So we grabbed my SUV when we went and set up, and it was awesome to be out there around all these people we didn't know, you know, offering us free food and beer and just, you know, associating on this beach. And that, I really loved. Folks might not know this, it's like 60 plus miles of primitive Beach, outside of Corpus Christi. But I didn't quite understand what we're really doing until the next morning, right at dawn, when I was awoken by these huge sounds of tractor trailers hauling right by the water right in front of us. Just a caravan of them driving down to the other end of the beach to do gas drilling. You know, we get out of the tent, and we're watching this and I mean, you just want to, you know, throw something at those trucks, you know, and go put your body in front or something like "What the hell's going on?" And you're just watching the rubber, the plastic, you name it just fall off these trucks. And in their wake is just a mass of debris, and trash. And this is all in endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle habitat, its nest a nesting area for the Kemp's ridley sea turtle. And that's why we were there. And so, you know, right after that we all commiserated and got to work and picked up more trash than I think, you know, I've ever picked up. And I'm still shocked that that was allowed. But that's really where I started to take a turn and understand more about how the state facilitates this destruction, the destruction of the land and for the profits of few. And shortly after that I graduated, and that was it for my time in Austin.

John Fiege  

So after you graduated from college, you went back to El Paso, and you became an environmental justice organizer for El Paso, ACORN. And it was shortly after your time there in 2009, that right wing activists did a big hit job on ACORN and brought down the organization in the US for the most part. An ACORN was was a powerful community organizing group at its height, and it had this unique community based organizing model. Could you talk a bit about the ACORN organizing model and how it, possibly, I assume, became part of your organizing DNA?

Dave Cortez  

Just like learning about the 1960s is a pillar of my practice. The  work with Acorn is right there with it. You know, it shaped me, maybe it's just because it's one of the first things I learned about, but it'll be with me, as long as I do this work and have breath in my lungs. You know, some people were quick to point to that it's built out of the school of the Industrial Areas Foundation and Saul Alinsky model of community organizing, and yeah, that's true. But, you know, I didn't know any of that. I didn't, you know, I was, I was just taken in by these folks. There was a guy, recovering addict, just trying to make his money doing his canvassing while I was hanging out at a coffee shop, kind of where I was living in El Paso, the university. And there's my day off and I'm out there hanging out. There's this dude, his name was Ken. Ken let me know how they were planning to reopen the ASARCO copper smelter, the big 120 820 foot tall smokestack that I grew up around, and I was shocked. And, and that's, you know, like I studied all these things. And I was like, wow, I cannot believe that that's right there, my mom lives over here, you know, she works there, I live over here. And, you know, I told them, whatever I can do to help: get more letters, spread a petition around, whatever I can do. And they invited me in to meet the team, which was a small team. And the first task they gave me was actually nothing to do with that it was just to go distribute information about free tax prep, helping people in a really poor community, not far from where I went to middle school in which is not far from the smelter, get access to tax prep, in English and Spanish. And at the time, I had a, I had a mohawk. I covered that thing up real fast. I wore a straw cowboy hat and went door to door knocking on people's doors, let them know about this. And Jose Manuel, the the lead organizer at the time, the director saw me and, you know, was into it. And, you know, they offered me a job after a few days of that. And the job was doing the same thing, plus inviting people to come to a community meeting about the reopening of ASARCO. So here's a way that we can help you. With some, you know, with your money, basically, your your bottom line, and also, there's a situation happening, that can affect and will affect your your health and well being, and the safety of your family. At the time, I didn't realize that there was a very intentional strategy there. But that strategy is essential to the work that we do as environmentalists and in climate justice activists around the country, and here in Texas, people are struggling, and you got to find ways to help them directly with what they're struggling with day to day, which is often their pocketbooks. And so if you can do that, you're going to build some trust, you can build some relationships, and then you might be lucky to talk to them about another bigger, more complicated issue.

John Fiege  

That seems to be, like, a really beautiful definition of the difference between environmental justice organizing, and traditional environmental organizing, where environmental justice organizing, you have to start with the community, and make sure everybody you know, you have to deal with everything, you can't just isolate an environmental issue. Would you agree with that?

Dave Cortez  

Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't know where that came from. I again, I'm not a I've read all the books about these things, but that, the model that was picked up by so many organizations and NGOs is is you know, it's it's almost like counter revolutionary, it's almost counterproductive. Like you're intentionally trying to marginalize your base in silos, you know, so, so whatever we do, you know, I try to espouse that in folks, some of the work we've done around Austin and other parts of Texas, that's the route we go, talk about bills, talk about bills every time and then, you know, start to figure out what else is going on, you know. With ACORN, a major flaw in the national model was that they would want to sign people up to be bank draft members, like you, you'd push a card onto them, "Hey, send this card in with your bank info or something. And we'll sign you up, you know, so you get access to our help." And obviously, I didn't do that. And as the work evolved, and we got more people canvassing and doing the work, we didn't do that either. It went against our values. Now, if there were middle class people, people with more means, yeah, we'd asked them to do that, too.

John Fiege  

To contribute a certain amount each month.

Dave Cortez  

Yeah. But we also did things differently, in the sense of, we organized, we found, you know, folks who are highly motivated by the issues, students, artists, residents in the nearby communities who wanted to contribute, and contribute their time, That theory in the ACORN model of, you got to get people financially bought in to be committed, I think can be challenged and there's lots of ways to get people plugged in. And so, one other key here was, you know, I wasn't brand new, this work wasn't brand new. There had been people fighting ASARCO before I was involved, obviously, and it had ebbed and flowed in terms of how much community opposition from just, like, working class people was centered. There was a lot of wealthier folks, politico types, you know, people who worked for legislators or senators or city people, you know, academics, things like that. And there was a handful of working class people in a smattering of workers from plant workers. So our job was really to find more just like students and people in the impacted communities, but it had been going on for so long that people were really drained. You know, parents who, whose children had MS as a result of this or had other health problems, they eventually backed off because it was just too exhausting to go up against the machine of the Texas State Government and go testify, and struggle, and they just couldn't do it anymore. You know, so we had to find new people and inject new life. You know, we made it a point to work with some of the younger folks to start a--not really an acorn chapter--but just a group on the campus called students for reform. And those kids are amazing, a couple dozen students, Chicanos, for the most part, all going off to do awesome things in their lives. But for three, three years, four years, they they led the fight, they're on campus challenging the administration to disclose more information and trying to represent student opposition to the reopening of the smelter.

John Fiege  

I was looking up some articles about ASARCO. I found this this one 2010 article from John Burnett, who's a NPR correspondent based in Austin. So he talks about in 2009, the US Justice Department announced the settlement of one of the largest environmental bankruptcies in US history, in which ASARCO would pay a record $1.79 billion to settle claims for hazardous waste pollution in you know, at 80 sites, as many as 20 states, including the copper smelting operation in in El Paso. And he quotes some interesting community members like an 82 year old former maintenance worker named Miguel Beltran, who says, "you can't get a job here in El Paso compared to ASARCO, ASARCO is the best place to work. We were just like a family." And John Burnett, also quotes an anti-smelter activist named Debbie Kelly, who says, "They marketed very well. And the people of El Paso were brainwashed believed that this was the most wonderful thing El Paso could possibly have, this tall polluting contaminating smokestack." And this is this classic tension and environmental justice organizing. The big polluter in town is often the biggest and best paying employer as well, especially for folks with limited education. And these working folks often side with the company in some ways, and then at some times, kind of accepting the environmental problems for the economic opportunities. And the smokestack itself is this shining symbol of progress and prosperity that goes way back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. What was your experience with this tension between economic opportunity and environmental health in the organizing, and how that was represented in the media?

Dave Cortez  

Well, let's take a few cracks at it, because it's a big question. You know, I'll start with my family, two of my close family members worked at the plant, my dad's brother worked at the plant and then worked at Chevron on the other side of town. And then his brother in law, worked at the plant and retired. And here I was, this younger punk, you know, sort of just not super close to the family, showing up at events, and that's what I'm doing and "oh," they think, "I'm a paid protester," you know, forget my education, forget what I'm actually saying. You know, it's, it's deep cultural assimilation. It's deep colonization, sort of this Stockholm syndrome that develops out of poverty and repression. It's horrific. And it's sad to watch, you know, people fiercely defend the only thing that has helped them, in their eyes, and not be able to acknowledge the harm that's been done. It's not different from, you know, addiction in that way.  Or, or depression in that way. 

John Fiege  

Right.  Or domestic abuse. Don't talk about it. 

Dave Cortez  

Domestic abuse. Exactly. You know, it's heartbreaking. It still hurts me to talk about. But, you know, that was the case. And you know, in that situation, just try and make peace with your family just, you know, get through the gathering. And you go on in, you know, some of my family was very supportive, you know, like, "yeah, that stuff's bad, and we should do better." You don't get investments in the well being of a community that like say, in Austin and all this money flooding here and STEM education being invested in and, you know, pre K access and, you know, nature based education and Montessori education, things like that. All of this is part of that, that conflict that pushes you to try and find the best thing you can for your family. And any of the workers that I organized alongside say the same thing. They were so proud and happy--Daniel Adriano another sort of lead visible face against the reopening of smelter, he's a former steel worker, you know, he tells a story about like, his dad worked there, his uncle, his cousins, you know, it was just like a family thing, like everybody, if you could get a job at ASARCO, you knew you'd be okay. You could raise a family, maybe even your wife or your spouse, your partner wouldn't have to work. But, you know, behind that, that Golden Gate, there was a lot of things that people weren't being told. You know, things like, maybe you shouldn't be taking your work clothes home and washing them. Right. They sent people home to wash, and that's very common in heavy industry in the 80s 70s 80s and 90s, you know, these these companies do that. In Danny's case, his kids got sick, you know, and they developed health problems. And he points to that as part of the reason washing his clothes in the same machine with, as his kids clothes. His wife feels guilt about that. Heavy guilt. 

John Fiege  

Yeah. That's hard. 

Dave Cortez  

You know, it's violating. You know, they had them--that settlement came because they, well, in part because ASARCO was caught for illegally incinerating hazardous chemical weapons waste materials from Colorado, in the smelter in these men weren't told about it. And they shoveled this stuff in there and were exposed to, you know, not recycled waste, just direct waste from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wow facility, a weapons manufacturing facility, Dow Chemical weapons manufacturing facility. That stuff was burned and they were exposed. You know, it's infuriating. And once they learned that, and they were falling ill and they had some evidence, they tried to organize other workers, let them know former workers let them know what was going on. And, and they encountered the same thing that I encountered with my family: just like this, this wall of acceptance, this willful ignorance. You know, I don't know about that, you know, just like denial, denial. And that was really hard on them. They got ostracized, they lost a lot of friends. You know, and so they found allyship in other people whose families had been sick, residents on the other side of the river in the Colonias, whose children had been severely sick, who were bleeding every night because of bloody noses and heavy metal contamination. You know, they found allyship with Debbie Kelly in the current place, which is sort of a wealthier neighborhood, you know, the educated, more white affluent folks who didn't want the smelter around. And this, that's how the "Get the lead out" coalition really came together it was--you just had these different interests aligned around this lack of justice, but the worker piece was always--and the economic piece was always always, you know, the straw that would break our back. And when ASARCO hired a PR firm, Teresa Montoya, to build their campaign, their marketing campaign to reopen the smelter, that was their big thing. I want to work for ASARCO I want to work for ASARCO and they march out all these Chicanos and throw them in front of a plant in their hard hats and talk about the good jobs and the pay. You know, it's tough to compete with. I know the people in Port Arthur, in Corpus Christi, even down in Brownsville, you know, and you name it. 

John Fiege  

It's the same story everywhere. It's the same story.

Dave Cortez  

In Appalachia, as well, with the coal miners. Absolutely. The amount of energy it takes to fight Goliath. You know, you never have enough you never have enough resources. You got a PR firm In, you know, this facility was owned and run ASARCO, Grupo Mexico owned by Carlos Slim, at the time the wealthiest man in the world, you know, like, you're never going to have enough just to stop the bad thing. How are you going to strategize and organize in a way where you're talking about building the good, and replacing it with something better and taking care of these people? It's doable, it absolutely is. But at the time, when you're in the sock like that, it's very hard to pivot. And it's very hard to motivate people who have resources to give you those resources to bring on people to pay them to do that work. It's a boxing match, take your hits, and wait for the time to throw a punch. You know, and I think one thing that really hurt people hurt ASARCO a lot, was when it came out that at their operations in Arizona, El Paso and elsewhere, in the 70s and 80s, they had been using health standards, health assessment screenings that were based on a false standard that black men and brown men had a 15% higher lung capacity than white men, therefore, they could be--they could work 15% longer, they could be exposed 15% more than white men. And that came out. And you know, we had some incredible, dedicated educated volunteers who were digging this information up, who were, you know, putting it to the to the news outlets. And without the news outlets putting that information out there, like the New York Times that put it out about the hazardous chemical weapons waste, you know, we wouldn't have been able to really punch back. But that stuff came out and then we could organize with it. We made materials out of it. I made sure everyone knew that, you know, this is the kind of crap that this place was built on, no matter what they say now you can't trust them. 

John Fiege  

Right. Yeah. And this--another thing that John Burnett brought up in this NPR story is, he quotes some longtime community members who said that when the winds were blowing to the south toward Juarez in Mexico, the smelter would crank up production and send pollution directly into Mexico where they could, they could do nothing to regulate it or stop it even worse than in the US. And that's a pretty insidious and cynical route around US environmental regulations. American companies have this long history of sending their polluting factories and jobs overseas. But in El Paso, they could just send the pollution directly to Mexico while keeping the plant and the jobs in the US. Were you able to do any cross border organizing in El Paso to combat this kind of flagrant disregard for air pollution in Mexico?

Dave Cortez  

I wasn't able to myself, or it wasn't a choice I made to do myself on the broader scale. Marianna Chu, who worked at the time for the Sierra Club, and as an independent activist and organizer did a whole hell of a lot and deserves a ton of credit. Marianna, and others were also were able to build relationships in the Colonias and get to talk to people that were, you know, the definition of directly impacted, right on the other side of the river. You know, you drive through, you pass on I-10, and you look to the left where you're passing through downtown, and it's just colonias and that's Colonia Felipe and some students who we'd found and became acquainted with at UTEP and were filmmakers and they were able to get over into the colonias and document the lived experience of some of these folks, and it's horrific, and they made a short film, I'm happy to share called The Story of Cristo and it's a little boy, you know, who's like that, he's bleeding, bleeding every night, because he's got heavy metal contamination, two years old. You know, and that story spread. You know, it was similar to other families all throughout the Colonia. Dirt roads, just full of metal, not a lot that could be done unless there was funds provided for it. And part of that settlement in relation to the chemical weapons waste was that ASARCO would give money to an outfit in Mexico to pave those roads. You know, that's it. Accept no wrongdoing. No, no responsibility. We don't admit nothing but, here, take this and leave us alone.

John Fiege  

Literally, sweeping it under the rug. They're just laying asphalt over the dust.

Dave Cortez  

Absolutely. I mean, that's that's absolutely right. And, you know, one interesting intersection here with with the colonias there was, as we marched towards the end of 2007 and 2008. You know, we're still fighting the plant, it started to become more and more dangerous and people were less responsive, and less receptive to being interviewed on camera with our comrades, and the gangs, were starting to move in to the Colonia and control things more. And that was that it wasn't safe anymore you can, the last thing you should be doing is driving over there with a camera. And so those stories sort of drifted away, those folks. And we weren't able to really work with them a whole lot more, because the narco war was starting to take root.

John Fiege  

Because it's, it's how it's the same thing they do to fight you, they give your neighbor a job, and then and they get your neighbor working against you. 

Dave Cortez  

Absolutely, I mean, you know, you're not going to go toe to toe with the same weapons, you got to find a way to find their weak spot and cut them at that weak spot. And, you know, I learned that, I learned that in this fight, you know, we weren't scared of these people. We weren't scared of their minions. We weren't scared of the, you know, the former workers who wanted the plant to open. We weren't scared of them. They tried. Everybody tried to intimidate you, you know, but I'll start with, with that part, first, as a critical strategy. My, you know, 23 year old high energy, Mohawk wearin' self, right, like, I thought I knew it all and was ready to go, just like against that jerk down on Red River Street in Austin. And, you know, the first public meeting, debate, whatever, that we helped organize, some of those, those workers were there outside and they were, you know, they pick a smaller person, a woman to argue with, and she ain't scared of them. But you know, soon enough, there's, there's four or five of them around her and oh, man, you know, machismo is something all of us from the border suffered from and that kicked in hard. You just get into it with these guys. But, you know, that is not the way, that is not the way. You know, arguing and fighting, especially with the people, even though they're trying to get you to do it. The people who want a job in these facilities, the community members who just want a better way for their life, you cannot let the people at the top pit us against each other. That's why it's so important to be anchored in community talking about the nuance, you know, how to step and where, what to look out for, and really trying to build together, it has to be at the forefront.

John Fiege  

Isn't that the history of American industrial capitalism, that for it to work, the, the industrialists need to pit various groups of people against one another, whether it's along lines of race, or income, or religion, or geography, or immigration status, or, or whatever. Like, that's, that's how it works. You need to divide people by those things, so they don't get together and they don't, they don't form a allegiances.

Dave Cortez  

That's right. That's right. I mean, it's, but it's not something that's created by the oligarchs and the industrial capitalists and the power holders. It's something that they exploit, right? It's a, it's a wound that's already there. And, you know, it's something that concerns me greatly about broader civil society, and our failures to build community, in relationship in brotherhood and sisterhood. You know, in a true spirit of mutual solidarity, the more that we neglect doing that work, the easier it is for something to divide us or someone to exploit it, we see it, there's an endless amount of examples we can point to. But if you start your work in trying to build something better, and build through a positive relationship, it's going to feed in the long run, it'll help you endure all of the struggles that are going to come the conflicts, you know, the the infighting, the personality disagreements, whatever, you got to have some foundation and I learned that from that, that night outside the UTEP Library arguing with these guys that, "No, we got to we got to find a way to work with these workers. We got to really center the fact that people need work in jobs." And and that's where, you know, I really started to become close with, not the guys I argued with, other workers who were already disaffected, Charlie Rodriguez, and Danielle Riano and Efrain Martinez and others. You know, they became, in some ways they already were but from my work, they became the center of what we're trying to do and focus on, that this is actually not what we want these, these jobs are not the kind that we need, because look what they did to me. And so that's one piece. We've got to find a way to get people more meaningfully involved with the policies we're trying to change, so there's just a far greater number of people pushing for positive investment in something that is, you know, not just like NGO staff, you know, like, the less NGO staff and those boardrooms, the better. You know, get every day, people in their meeting, pressing for these decisions, and calling for it, and that makes it much harder for the special interests to push push their own agenda.

John Fiege  

Well, that's a good transition to Occupy Wall Street. So in 2011, Occupy Wall Street began in New York City in Zuccotti Park. And then the movement quickly spread around the world, including to Austin. And I know you were heavily involved in Occupy Austin, and its campaign to get the city to divest from commercial banks. I participated in a couple of those occupy Austin Bank actions. And I don't think I'd met you yet. But, you know, as many people might remember, one of the big discussions and debates around Occupy was whether and how to organize and whether to make formal demands, which always makes me think of Frederick Douglass who famously said, "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did. And it never will." But those words from Frederick Douglass, were not the guiding light of many occupy organizers and participants, I'd love to hear you talk a bit about your experience with Occupy Austin, and the internal debates and conflicts about what it was and how it should operate. And what you brought away from that whole experience that you put into your organizing work after that. 

Dave Cortez  

Yeah, it was one of the most exciting times of my life so far, you know, to be able to three, four, sometimes five nights a week, meet up with 50 to 60 people not at a general assembly, but a working group meeting, and everybody's there ready to, you know, talk and break out and figure out the next step for getting people to close bank accounts. And, you know, organizing the rally and building the art and all those things. It was organic. I'm so happy that, I'm fortunate to have that experience in this city, and in this country. It was real, you see the romanticized version of uprisings in film, in writing, and on the news, different ways around the world. But, you know, this was that, at least the closest I've been to it, and it wasn't just the, you know, the sign holding, and, you know, petition gathering, we did all that. But it was, I mean, like people were, people were in, you know, the sacrifice time away from whatever they had going on around them to contribute to something better, and I have never seen an appetite, so large for participating and contributing to something that can change the world. I've seen it tried to be engineered a whole lot by NGOs. And it's laughable. It's insulting, you know, but for me at the time, it was it was like a dream come true. I remember a week before occupy launch, there was a meeting happening at Ruta Maya, and the room was full of people, and, you know, a bunch of white dudes, hippie yoga types on stage, you know, talking about some stuff, but I'm up there front row, just, you know, like, eager. And just like listening, I'm like, "This is great," you know, so they open the mic for everybody to come up and have something to say. And it was awesome. I'd just never seen it. You know, I was like, "wow, this is the Austin I always wanted to see," you know. Sure enough there was a meeting after that the next day, and the next day after that. And that kind of continued on for a few days. And then and then there was the day of the launch and lots of people packing City Hall. I mean, you couldn't move there were so many people out there and there were people talking for hours. Everybody was just willing to stay. And you know, I can't, I just can't believe how patient people were for weeks. And just like hanging out. You know, I think they just wanted something different. And they wanted to be part of something, like I said, Now, me, day one. I'm like, "yo, if we're gonna be out here, we need some data." And I got my clipboard. And my dear friend and former partner Betsy had been working for a group that was doing foreclosure organizing and getting people to move their bank accounts or close their bank accounts. And so, you know, I got some, some materials from her and took up like six clipboards, to the to the rally. And that was my whole shtick was just like, "Hey, y'all, we should close our corporate bank accounts," and people loved it. You know, it was like, "hey, here goes, put your name down, if you want to help out," and I mean, I filled up pages and pages of this thing, people who wanted to help out or close their bank accounts. And from that, you know, like, you'd find more people that were like, "Hey, I used, you know, I can help with that. And I used to work at a bank," or, you know, "I've got some time on my hands," you know. And so we, it was rad, because while all the noise was happening, the day to day that people were more familiar with Occupy Wall Street. You know, the the General Assemblies, the infighting, the conflicts with the unhoused folks and things like that, we had this parallel track of our bank action crew, which was doing, building switch kits, and, you know, trying to reach out to people to, you know, help walk them through how to close their bank accounts and stuff like that, or organize marches on the bank, so people could go in and come out and cut their credit cards, so we could all celebrate, you know, like, that was, that was great. That's classic organizing. I, you know, if you weren't down in City Hall, every day for that first month, you're missing out on something, you know, I don't think people appreciate enough how much work people invested into trying to maintain a space, like, maintaining a physical encampment is, you know, the people with the most knowledge on how to operate a small, little civil society is the people have been doing it before, which is our unhoused folks, you know. And there was a huge class conflict, that really emerged quickly, that the police and the city manager and others began to exploit, you know, by trying to bring more unhoused folks down to City Hall, allowing some to sell and distribute drugs, not enforcing any oversight, you know, we had women attacked, you know, and attempted assaults and things like that, that they were just looking the other way on. Because they wanted this to go away. And it was up to us to figure out how to manage that. And that really became the core of the non-bank action, kind of conversations. You know, everybody wanted to do solidarity with everything else. But it was really about, like, how do we keep this thing going? And how do we maintain our presence here? You know, do you negotiate with the city? Who negotiates? Who's responsible? Do we just say, you know, F-U, we're not going to talk to you all, you know, but like, through all that, like, some amazing friendships were developed, and I mean, like bonds, true, real friendships, and people may not be super close anymore, but all it would take is a phone call or text to bring people back together. You know, it's something I'll just value for the rest of my life.

John Fiege  

Yeah, totally. And in 2015, The Austin Chronicle named you the best environmental activist in Austin for your work as, "The heart and soul of Sierra Club's 'Beyond Coal' campaign in Central Texas." And I know you've done all kinds of work with the Sierra Club. But I wondered if you could talk about what the fight has been like to transition from dirty energy to clean energy in Texas, which, of course is the oil capital of the country. And looking over the years you've been doing this work, what stands out? What have you learned from this massive campaign?

Dave Cortez  

Like you said, it's Texas, we're the number one carbon emitter in the country, and a huge one in the world and the United States cannot meet the modest two week goals in the Paris Accords unless Texas gets its act together, you know, and we got some real problems here, not just from fossil fuel pollution, but from industrial and toxic pollution and just from our livelihoods, you know, there's another story out yesterday, you know, are we going to have power next week, because we're going to hit hit the peak of the summer. You know, it's hard to think about the fight for clean energy in Texas without thinking about the power of the fossil fuel and industrial industries. There's there's been a battle since 2000 and 2005 to stop new power plants and advocate for clean energy. The fuel type changes and you know, back then it was coal and then it is gas and and now, it's like, oh my god, we just don't have enough power. Now, how do we get it? But it's still the, you know, trade associations, the Association of Electric Companies in Texas, you know, Oncor, which is an electric distributor company, NRG, you go down the line, Energy Transfer Partners, all of these fossil fuel corporations, making billions and billions of dollars, still call the shots, they still influence, and basically direct, decision makers on what is going to be acceptable in terms of, even, discussion. You can't even get a hearing in the state legislature on flaring reduction, which is a very modest thing. Because they have enough influence to make sure that that conversation is not even going to happen. And their members, like Energy Transfer Partners, and others are some of the biggest donors to politicians in the state. So, you know, why shouldn't we listen to those people? Kelsy Warren, Dakota Access Pipeline CEO, behind Energy Transfer Partners, gave a million dollars, his largest donation ever to Governor Abbott, right immediately after the legislative session. And this is after his company made well over a billion dollars, I think it's closer to $2 billion, coming out of the winter storm, Energy Transfer Partners. While people died, these people decided it would make better financial sense and profit sense to go ahead and withhold supplies of gas to power plants and gas utilities, and let the price go up before they would deliver that gas and therefore make a ton of money. Forget that more than you know, some say 200, some say 700 people died, many of them freezing to death, many of them carbon monoxide poisoning during the storm, forget that. It's all about the money. And that's the biggest takeaway here, just like we would be fighting Carlos Slim, and ASARCO and other folks, you got to look at what the interest is, you know, why are people supporting this? Why are they facilitating this? I know, it's easy to just say, well, we just got to vote these people out. Well, you know, we've got to come up with strategies that will allow us to do that. We've got to come up with strategies that will make it so, in this state that's so heavily corrupt and captured by corporate interests, fossil fuel interests, industrial interests, that we're going to find a way to cut into their enabling electorate. Their enabling base. And it's more than just a voter registration strategy. It's more than just a mobilization strategy, or getting people to sign a petition, it gets back to what we started talking about with ACORN. What is their base? Where are they? What are their interests? And where does it make sense to try and make some inroads, and cut away? And unfortunately, we just don't have enough of that happening in Texas. There's an effort to try to build coalitions with, you know, some social justice and some youth focused organizations. But we're all part of that same progressive "groupthink" or Democratic base, that we're not actually doing much to expand, other than registering some new voters. And there's a lot of unpacking that needs to happen. You know, can we go talk to some steel workers or some people on the Texas-Mexico border, who started to vote more for Republicans and Trump, because they were worried about the Green New Deal? They're worried about losing their oil jobs. Why, I mean, like, to this day, we haven't made that pivot collectively as a movement, and it's hella frustrating.

John Fiege  

Yeah, it gets back to what we were talking about earlier with, you know, kind of the DNA of environmental justice orientation to this work, the work has to be intersectional if you want to transition Texas, the oil capital of the world, to to non-fossil fuel based energy, you know, you need to deal with, with voting rights, you need to deal with the bad education system, you need to deal with healthcare issues, you need to deal with police brutality, and you know, it's like it's all connected. To think that we can remove this issue of decarbonizing our energy source from all of that other, you know, what some people see as messy stuff is delusional, it just doesn't doesn't work, doesn't make sense. Especially, and it's so obvious in places like Texas, where, you know, what are they doing? They're just trying to, they're trying to suppress the vote, like, they know what the deal is, you know, they're they're losing numbers. They need to disenfranchise more voters in order to maintain this system. 

Dave Cortez  

You know, there's an important caveat and distinction for environmentalists, environmental justice folks, or whatever. You know, if you talk to John Beard with Port Arthur Community Action Network, you know, he's a former steel worker. His whole pitch in Port Arthur is about youth engagement jobs, investing in the community. He's willing to talk to the companies, things like that. It's not environmental-first type of thinking. But the enviros, and you'll see this any legislative session, if you pay attention, we are on the far losing side of the losers. Okay, the Democrats being the losers, you know, Democrats in Texas carry House Bill 40, which is the ban on fracking bans. You know, Mrs. T, Senator Senfronia Thompson out of Houston, she authored that bill, Black Democrat, you know, revered for her work on voting rights and reproductive justice. You know, enviros, we are way, way out of the mix. And so even if we got those organizations doing the work you're talking about, to speak about climate change, speak about the grid, you know, pollution, things like that, we'd still be part of that losing side. And I'm not saying we need to need to be building out into red country, or rural country. It's a critique of the broader progressive movement that we aren't doing enough to find people, the greater majority of people that don't participate in our process, in politics, in voting, except in presidential elections. We are not doing enough to reach people who are just going about their lives and do not give a s**t about the things that we post online about our petitions or positions, or our op-eds, or whatever. That is where the fight is, we've got to draw more people in while the right wing tries to keep more people out. That's our only pathway. And so--

John Fiege  

What does a just transition mean to you?

Dave Cortez  

It's what we've been talking about, it's a whole shift in, you know, the operating system of a of a community, whether it's a town of 50,000 people or a state of, you know, 25 million. Just transition means that we're taking into full consideration, our triple bottom line, you know, our health, and shelter, and food, you know, our economics, our jobs, and ability to put, you know, bring income and get the things that we need. And, you know, just the land and our ecology. Just transition has to anchor that we are--that those things are connected, and that they're not--they can't be separated, that in order for our families, and our children and our neighbors and all that, to have a future and have a livelihood, we need to be concerned about our air quality, concerned about our water quality, but also about the quality of their education, the access to healthy food and grocery stores. If you were to talk to people and ask them to envision what, you know, their dream society looks like, which is a hard thing for people to do nowadays. You know, you'll hear some of these things and just transition is the process that we take to get there. It's not about you know, getting a worker from a fossil fuel job into a clean energy job.

John Fiege  

Well, and speaking of that, you know, in addition to your beyond coal and just transition work, you've done a lot of work with low income communities of color in Austin around a whole assortment of things: illegal dumping, access to green space, community solar and solar equity, green gentrification among among a bunch of other stuff. Can you talk about gentrification and how Austin has changed in the time you've been there and the tension that's emerged about Austin becoming one of the greenest but also increasingly one of the least affordable cities in the country? 

Dave Cortez  

Yeah it's tough. People in Austin are largely still here to just party, have fun, make money. You know, they're really eager to do what they moved here for, you know, go do the cool thing and the restaurant, and the corporate soccer game and whatnot, you know, fine, whatever, I'm not trying to harp on people who want to have a good time, the problem is that there's no thread of the greater good of civil society, of trying to care for those in town that struggle and have the least. That doesn't exist here. It's just, it has lessened every year, it might be new people moving here might be more money here, and people being displaced. But you know, for the most part, with gentrification, the white wealthy middle class here is strong, you know, median family income is close to $90,000, you know, qualifying for affordable housing, you can make a ton of money and still qualify for affordable housing. And the people that move in, my brother calls them the new pilgrims. They're not super interested in learning what was there before, they're interested in what's around them now, and what might come in the future. And we do have a responsibility to make sure that we not just offer up but press on people at the doors, at community events, you know, cool, fun, s**t, barbecues and things like that, to learn what was there before they came, you know, sort of an onboarding into the neighborhood. And we did some of this in Montoplis, my old neighborhood that I lived in before I moved to South Austin, you know, people who I was like, "man, they're never going to help us," they're just, you know, part of that new white, middle class "new pilgrim." When I learned the history of the community, and the issues that were going on, I said, "Hell, yeah, whatever I can do," from, you know, cooking funding, speaking, writing letters, coming to meetings, you name it, you know, but we had to keep on 'em. And we had to give them a meaningful task. There is a lot of power, gentrification sucks. But I've really tried to work with myself on not being--automatically hating folks for just trying to move in into a home. But you do have to challenge folks on how they behave after they've moved in, you know, in Austin with our urban farming and desire for new urbanism and density and things like that, the culture of I know what's best is so thick, and it's really hard to stay patient. But I try to, even when I get mad and angry and frustrated, I try to remind people of what's called the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, and the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond's Principles of Anti-Racism, encourage them to read them, and to do everything they can to just shut the F up, and go listen to the people that they're talking about in affected communities. And get a sense of where you might be able to build some common ground.

John Fiege  

I actually wanted to spend a minute on that because, you know, you started, or you were one of the organizers, who started environmental justice group in Austin years ago, and I went to a bunch of the meetings. And I feel like that's where, you know, we got to start hanging out a bunch for the first time. But you would always start the meetings with the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing. And, you know, those came out of this meeting hosted by the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice and Jemez, New Mexico back in the 90s. Can you talk more specifically about the principles and why they're important to the work you're doing?

Dave Cortez  

So when you're thinking about undoing racism, or being an antiracist or antiracism work, you know, you're acknowledging that you're confronting a built system, something that's built under a false construct, race, you know, and when you're going to combat that, there's, you know, there's a lot of issues to it or whatever, but the Jemez principles will help you see, how do you approach people and talk about it? You know, for example, listen, let people speak is one of the principles, you know, listen to the people on the ground. Don't barge in there don't don't come in with your your petition and your fancy stuff and, or be online and be a dick. You know, go try to introduce yourself and get to know people. You know, ask questions. That's okay. You know, people were very generous for the most part, whether they're Black or Brown or or Native or Asian, or you name it, you know? If you're able to ask questions and listen about an issue, people will likely talk, you know. Trying to work in solidarity and mutuality is another big one for me, you know, it's not just about like, "I'm here to help you," versus, "I'm here because our struggles are connected and intertwined. And for me and my family to be successful and get what we need, it depends on your family, and your people being successful and getting what you need. How can we work together to make sure that we everything we do reinforces that and that we lift each other up?" A lot of things that we see is very transactional in the advocacy and activism world, you know, sign this, and then we'll go do that for you, or will tell the person to do the thing and change? It's not so much how can what can we do to help you directly, like we talked about bills and taxes and things like that. But also, we have to know that, what is it we're gonna get out of it, it's not just this potential policy outcome. There's tremendous value in human relationships. And in culture and community building, you're going to learn about the people in your community, you're going to learn about the history, you're going to learn, you know, and make new friends and maybe some recipes, maybe, you know, some new music or something. It's limitless. You know, humans have tremendous potential in beauty. But we we rob ourselves of that by, you know, retreating into our silos in our, in our four walls. You know, Jemez can give something--these are short, short, little principles that can give people something to read and reflect on, they can be kind of abstract and theory based, but when you're advocating for change, and then you look at these and you ask yourself, "sm I doing this?" There's tremendous potential for learning, and changing how we do our work.

John Fiege  

And the Sierra Club is one of the oldest large-scale environmental groups in the world. And it's traditionally been a white organization. Its founder John Muir made racist remarks about Black and Indigenous people, and in 2020, the Sierra Club officially apologized for those remarks and the white supremacist roots of the organization. In Texas, with your work and your presence, I feel like you've really helped the Sierra Club evolve there, where you are, and you thrive there, despite the structural and institutional challenges. Can you talk about what it's been like to come into the Sierra Club as a Chicano or organizer and from El Paso?

Dave Cortez  

Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, there's a crew. First and foremost, there's a crew of brilliant and dedicated people within our team and our staff that have pressed and carried the torch for, you know, we pushed for that, what you just talked about. Bryan Parras and Bekah Hinojosa and Shane Johnson and Christopher Basaldu, and Vanessa Ramos and Misti O'Quinn, Natalie Martinez and others of our Black, Indigenous and Persons of Color caucus, in our staff, and others who came before, we've pushed for these acknowledgments. And it's, it's been tough, it's wonderful to be surrounded by so many rad folks right now in the staff. Because I remember when that wasn't the case, you know, Texas is unique  in the Sierra Club universe, because we, you know, it's a chapter, and we're not the national organization, so there's a lot more room to mold and break apart and reshape things. The national organization, you know, is a lot more difficult just by sheer size and numbers and geography, you know, but I still remember when I was doing the Blue-Green Alliance stuff, and working with Sierra Club, you know, the countless numbers of boardrooms I'd walk into being the only brown person. And on top of that, you know, not being a policy person or someone with advanced degree, just an organizer, the number of years that I was described as being the rabble rouser with them with the bullhorn, you know, are the one who could give a speech or something like that, not acknowledged for any thing else: the critiques the strategy, the ideas, you know, that just recently begun to break away from that as I've been around more people and done more things. The environmental world is white, it's classist, it's racist. And, you know, it's gonna take time for that to really shift, you know, and I really just, again, admire and appreciate not just in Sierra Club, but all across the movement, the BIPOC folks and the Persons of Color that are holding it down and doing the work. You know, I look at groups like Southwest Workers Union in San Antonio that has stayed on steady course in the last few years just to look at the whole picture of just transition at community building, and taking care of their people in the whole, and I'm so grateful to see that that's a thing and that they're still carrying that mantle. Our membership in Sierra Club, as most folks who know the organization would know, is older and whiter, mostly male, mostly middle class, and upper middle class. So to have folks with these different backgrounds and demographics, working there, speaking loudly, calling for change, inevitably causes conflict and tension. And it wasn't until a few years ago, where I started some of the things I've been telling you today about building and understanding and culture building really started to take root because before then I was very similar to how I was at ASARCO, like, screw you, s**t or get off the pot. And that wasn't really working, you know. And, for me, the solution to the pollution, as Bobby Seale said, of this problem of racism and classism in the environmental movement, it is dilution, but it also is people's uprising and revolution. There are so many folks out there who care about the future of the land, the air, the water, and our grid in Texas. And we need to do better to afford them opportunity to be leaders in this work. There's a belief in environmental circles that I do not understand at all, that only folks who have been around for a while who know the stuff, know the issues can be the ones that are the leaders and the chairs and the board of directors and things like that. And that's just way off base. You know, if we don't invest in cultivating new leadership and letting folks have the mantle to make decisions and make mistakes, then all those folks are just going to die off and run this thing into the ground, which is happening in a lot of ways. And you know, that's a that's a constant struggle for me and for others in trying to get the folks, who've held power in Sierra Club and environmental spaces for, many times more than 20 years, be willing to let go of that power.

John Fiege  

Well, years ago, you wrote a Facebook post that you titled "Earth Day Reflection on Privilege in Environmental Justice Organizing, I want to just quote from you for a second, you wrote, "The world's a different place when you see a tower of death every day, from most every part of your city. When you can run your hand across your school railing and see yellow chalk like particulate pollution on your fingertips. When plant workers complain of excruciating pain and illness while showing you scars and tumors on their arms. I personally hold a tremendous amount of internalized anger and oppression inside my body, and my heart that fuels my organizing and at more times than I'd like to admit my pure hatred." While you acknowledge the importance of anger and organizing you go on to say, "but I've learned that anger only carries you so far, that without a crystal clear symbol of oppression like an 828 foot tall smokestack, a dying husband or wife or ill child, you have to rely on more than anger to build a movement. Humans have a history of forgetting our history, we move on." So this is just a short Facebook post, but it feels like there's a lifetime of experience behind it. Can you talk a bit about what you were getting at here, and how you've come to now view the relationship and tension between anger and movement building?

Dave Cortez  

You know, more often than not, people are compelled to action in a fight or flight mode, run away or challenge without much thinking, you know, it's our natural reaction. And it becomes more and more difficult to reflect on what caused us to take action. And to think further ahead about what are we trying to actually build and do. As I've mentioned several times, we don't give people the opportunity, nor the space to have those kinds of reflections, and then listen to others and take that and actually use it to inform how we're going to do the work that we're setting out to do. I have a lot of guilt around the ASARCO work, because, you know, I had the opportunity to leave. And I did, and I feel like I left folks behind. Any community I've organized in, I carry guilt, because, you know, I've moved on with my life, every single one, it's a tough thing, you know, and it's a testament to the need to leave behind infrastructure as best you can. I believe, just like, we need social workers and firefighters and electricians and plumbers, we need organizers available at scale, to support communities in their--in this work and in their infrastructure, building and maintenance, you know, and without it, I think we just depend on people to do it. And that's not sustainable. You know, in through all of that, we can look back on things, we can learn together, we can look back on our--what we did our struggles, or our tactics or strategies, our demonstrations from the KKK rally to the Iraq war to Occupy, Save our Springs, whatever, and try and find ways to share that knowledge in alignment in, in spirit of the indigenous peoples of the land, and the culture and the and the lifeways that they've carried, and that we've moved away from so much. You know, it wasn't until the water protectors work that I became involved in, in 2016, that I really, and my brother, ___ Ward, really began to realize how much harm the anger was doing to me, spiritually and physically and mentally, it was always easy to get angry, and then use that, you know, but I found myself spread thin, people around me telling me I gotta slow down, I was doing too much, I gotta get some sleep, I couldn't sleep, I was drinking a whole ton, you know, and, through that work and through prayer and ceremony, and time in the lodge and around the fire, and in listening to various elders in the community, I was able to really, you know, let go of some of that and still hold it but let go of the tension and try to move towards, what is it I want to build in my life? What I want to work on in my life and, and bring into the world, you know, and without all of that I wouldn't have I wouldn't have crossed paths with my partner, we wouldn't have gone camping at the launch of a pipeline camp in West Texas and come across some sacred red tail hawks, a whole family of them, we wouldn't have had that trip together, we wouldn't have had our daughter, and all the things that have come since. 

John Fiege  

There's an Austin American Statesman article from 2016 that talks about you and Pete Rivera door knocking around various low income neighborhoods of color in Austin, talking about energy efficiency. And Pete Rivera is is the president of the Springdale Airport Neighborhood Association. And he's quoted in this article talking about educating low income residents on lowering energy usage and accessing energy rebates and subsidies from the city. He says "it's just a lack of us reaching out to people where they are, actually at their homes. Nobody has gone house to house." And part of the work you and Pete are doing here is countering that classic narrative from fossil fuel interests, that environmental protection, and a transition to clean energy will hurt poor people. But I also just love the sentiment of the story: Let's go house to house and start conversations with about these important issues. An that's what you've been talking about. It's just, like, true community organizing and having known you for a long time now, I'd say that this act of walking around the neighborhood and starting conversations, which I've done with you and I've seen you do it, and, you know, learning from people and sharing your knowledge, I'd guess that that's kind of your your sweet spot and where you're happiest. What do you think about that?

Dave Cortez  

Going door to door in a way where you're not just, like, trying to get something quick and hit a certain quota of doors in a certain amount of time, otherwise some, you know, aspiring politician or political staff member is gonna get on your ass because you didn't hit it, you know, like, it's wonderful man. It's just talking, you know, it's been around people getting to know and through it all. The more tactics and cards you have up your sleeve to deploy, you know, about, I'm talking about the houses in the neighborhood going up for sale, or the loose dog you saw or the chickens running around, or whatever it is, you look around, you know everything around you, and that's all of your material to use to chat, you know, to get to know somebody. It's just, it's beautiful it's authentic. And people may invite you into their home, before the pandemic, they might invite you into their home, they might offer you some food, or water, show you around, I mean, you could spend an hour in one house, on one door, and learn so much there. And it's just such a wonderful experience that I want as many changemakers as possible to be afforded the opportunity to do that. And then to come together and talk about what that experience is like, what they learned, you know, and then to strategize together about how do we actually, you know, as strangers in the neighborhood that don't live there? How do we make a plan to cede the space to these folks and support them, so they're the ones going around, like Pete, and talking to their neighbors, and building some infrastructure, like the Springdale airport Neighborhood Association, and help them you know, supply their meetings, if we need transport, to their meetings, food at their meetings, you know, whatever it is. And, you know, the wild part about all that work is, technically it wasn't really, you know, what I was "funded to do" by the Beyond Coal campaign, I was supposed to shut down a coal plant.

John Fiege  

Right, I always noticed that you always had your hands in so many different things. And I would always be like, "this isn't a Sierra Club work." This is like, you're involved in so many different organizations, and so many different people and communities. But that's, that's what community organizing is.

Dave Cortez  

That's right. And that'll be my role going forward and talking to funders and other other folks about, you know, defining the "work." You know, I made the case, and I laid it out for the coal people in Sierra Club, why that strategy mattered, in terms of their city council votes and the need to build a base in city council districts where we had, you know, sometimes 10, or fewer members, we had a strategy for actually doing it, and doing it successfully. And we did it in a way, John, that, yeah, in the end, we got those council members to vote against the coal plant and vote for clean energy and all that stuff. Sure. But all along the way, we were providing direct help to people, and letting them know about smaller trash bin sizes they, they could easily, we could help them apply for, in some cases, they could save $30, $40 a month, right then and there. Or get an additional recycling bin, then learn how to recycle. 

John Fiege  

That's awesome. 

Dave Cortez  

We helped advocate for safer routes for the kids to go to school, so they wouldn't have to crawl under the train to go to school. And most visibly, most known is the cleanup of the Red Bluff Vista. 50 years of illegal dumping of oil and construction materials, atop one of the most beautiful views in all of Austin. You know, working alongside Pete and his brothers, you know, as we did all this, we talked to people about what do you know about La Loma? What do you know about Red Bluff and the hill up there? You know, Hungry Hill, how do your kids get to school? You know, what do you think about that new house that got built, rent and things like that, you know, we're not talking about coal, we're not talking about solar, you know, we're helping on things that they need and that they know. And everything that we touched around there was highly successful because it was community led, it was the concerns of the community put front and center. The only thing that we couldn't confront and that I hold some guilt around is the displacement and gentrification because that is just a tsunami that's incredibly tough to fight back. And now we're seeing Springdale airport be targeted for some incredibly insane redevelopment.

John Fiege  

Sp we're wrapping up here, how does environmental organizing in the environmental movement need to change to quickly and effectively address the mounting ecological crises we're facing around the country and around the world? What are you seeing from Texas?

Dave Cortez  

You know, we need to acknowledge right away and be fully clear that even with our, you know, C3 and C4 and different funding pots, we need to acknowledge that the root of the problem here is the political system that is operated and controlled by fossil fuel and corporate interests, and is going to continue to prioritize the needs of those corporations and companies over the needs of the people, and that we need to defeat them. And then we can work backwards to figure out the strategies to defeat them. We're going to see that, you know, we need to do as much local work in Texas as possible, you know, cities, towns, school districts, around some of the positive things like clean energy, like bill savings and energy efficiency, the winter storm and the grid collapse has presented us an incredible opportunity to do that kind of organizing and talk about what people can do to make sure that they don't suffer from that, again, that we hold people accountable. And just continue to drive on this economic lens, front and center, and build as much infrastructure as we can, but really try to tie people back to that, that larger reform that's needed, and do so in a way, most importantly, that is bringing folks that generally participate politically every four years, or maybe don't participate politically every four years, focusing on those two constituencies to bring them into the fold. So when we have our local races, and our, you know, State Representative and Senator races, that those folks are activated, and they're ready to challenge any, you know, Republican or Democrat to hold the line on grid and climate and environmental justice issues. We're not doing much of that at all right now.

John Fiege  

How has your relationship with the rest of the natural world changed since you were a kid growing up in El Paso? 

Dave Cortez  

I think it's oddly similar, and you know, like I said, my dad would get us out all the time, I talked to my daughter about how we used to, you know, throw open the garage door and bust out the lawn chairs and watch the rain every time it happened. And more often than not run out and grab the trash can lids and go for a ride down the curb down the water, you know, and make our way down to the creek or whatever the Arroyos that were out there, you know, our time in the desert, hiking in the dry Arroyos. You know, a lot of times as a kid, I was very, "I don't want to be out here," you know, typical kid stuff. And now I you know, yeah, I love it. And I, I'd rather spend my whole day in it. You know, I think I'm more in tune with the ecology and the impact of various things on our ecological balance from, you know, drought, to invasive species pollution, and, of course, the the changing climate patterns. But, more than anything, the deepest change would be something like my spiritual connection with that land. I wasn't aware of that as a child, you know, and even just giving thanks to the pecan tree that shades my house, every day. The value of that, you know, praying to the river and giving gratitude to the cottonwood trees, it's a core part of who I am now. 

John Fiege  

So I've asked you to bring a quotation to read that's been particularly meaningful in your journey in life. Could you end the show by reading what you brought and telling the story of its significance to you? 

Dave Cortez  

Yeah, let me let me start off by reading it and then I'll we'll get into it. This is from Audre Lorde, radical intersectional, feminist, poet and author. And it was written in the 1980s, in reflection on on the 1960s and Malcolm X. And the most famous part is the first line and then I'm going to read quite a bit more from the speech afterwards. "There is no such thing as a single issue struggle, because we do not live single issue lives. Malcolm knew this, Martin Luther King Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular. But we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us, and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagan said so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor the hard work of becoming ourselves and effective. We lose our history so easily. What is not pre-digested for us by the New York Times, or The Amsterdam News, or Time Magazine, maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas and ourselves. When I hear the deepest truth, I speak coming out of my mouth, sounding like my mother's, even remembering how I fought against her. I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me, woman, black, we do not have to romanticize our past, in order to be aware of how it seeds are present. We do not have to suffer the waste of amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past, rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to. We know how important it is to not lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived. And that is what it is all about: survival and growth. Within each one of us there's some peace of humaneness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis, and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one of us here is a link in the connection between anti-poor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women and resurgent violence against black people. I ask myself as well as each one of you: exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives." The first line in that, the single issue lives and single issue struggle, you know, I didn't learn about that until the House Bill Two protests at the State Capitol against, you know, Wendy Davis, and abortion restrictions in in Texas, and there were two young women holding a sign that had that. And that's around the same time, I was going through some antiracism training classes, and, you know, it fit, right, like, I was carrying a sign that said something about like, we don't have to take this crap, the same people behind this are the same ones that are polluting our air, you know, putting our kids in prison, you know, whitewashing history, etc. And so it was exciting to learn about Audre Lorde, and what, what was she talking about? Deeper than that, as you hear in the in the quote, it's, you know, one, we have a responsibility. And two, we have so much that we can tap into that we ignore. And if you go on to read the whole piece, she'll get in even deeper, something that should resonate with a lot of activists around, and lefties around the country, you know about our own infighting about how much we do to minimize each other's identities and contributions in order to prop ourselves up, or make us more of a visible or vocal authority in a space. There's so much to unpack from this. And for me, it's part of that deeper level of power and culture shift that we need to get to, when so much of what I've talked to you about today, and changes in the movement is more of like, how do we march towards that place? 

John Fiege  

Yeah, well, what often strikes me about these brilliant thinkers and writers and reading their work decades after it was written or said, it often strikes me how present it feels. 

Dave Cortez  

And not just the relevance in that way, but I mean, she's reflecting on 20 years before then. Right? It's 40 years since she said this and wrote this. And you have, like, you know, I really grill into people as much as I can: reflect on the amount of time that it has taken the right wing and the corporate elites to build their power, and what pushed them to. They responded to the 1960s. They responded to Nixon signing, you know, the Clean Water Act and all those other transformative Earth policies, Earth Day policies, and they took their time, and they used the culture wars, the Christian conservatism, and the right wing stuff in the 1980s to build a formidable machine and base and they're reaping the benefits now.

John Fiege  

Well, thank you so much. This has been amazing. 

Dave Cortez  

I'm grateful for the space and the time to process some of these things and talk about them.

Outro

John Fiege  

Thank you so much to Dave Cortez. Go to our website at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can find the quotation Dave read from Audrey Lorde, plus book and media recommendations.

This episode was researched and edited by Gabriela Cordoba Vivas. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

If you enjoyed my conversation with Dave, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Contact me anytime at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can also subscribe to our newsletter and support us with a donation.

When we’re gone from this Earth, what will we leave behind? What will we pass down to those who come after us?

Plastic. If nothing else, lots of plastic. A plastic bag might take 20 years to break down, but harder, thicker plastics, like toothbrushes, might take 500 years or more to break down.

Elizabeth Bradfield is a poet and naturalist who sees first hand, in her work as a marine educator, the ravaging impacts of plastic on marine life. But she also confronts plastic and our collective addiction to it as a subject of poetry.

Her poem, “Plastic: A Personal History,” is what she calls a “cranky naturalist” poem, which is pretty funny, but embedded in the humor are big questions: how has plastic become part of who we are as individuals and as a species? Now that we know the dangers and devastating effects of plastic production and disposal, how must we change our relationship to this petrochemical product? What kind of world are we making, and what alternatives do we have?

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Toward Antarctica. She co-edited the newly-released anthology, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and Orion, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Brandeis University and is founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press. She lives on Cape Cod, where she also works as a naturalist and marine educator.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Elizabeth Bradfield

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Toward Antarctica, which uses haibun and her photographs to query the work of guiding tourists in Antarctica, and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro.

Bradfield is also co-editor of the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020.

A professor and co-director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University, Bradfield has received a great deal of recognition through awards and fellowships. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, Orion, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. 

Based on Cape Cod, Liz also works as a naturalist, adding an engaging and proactive component to back up the prowess of her evocative literature. She also is the founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, a journal and grass-roots initiative that, through monthly publications, aims to expose the broader community (beyond academia) to relevant literature and art.

“Plastic: A Personal History”

By Elizabeth Bradfield

How can I find a way to praise

Recommended Readings & Media

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege

When we’re gone from this Earth, what will we leave behind? What will we pass down to those who come after us?

Plastic. If nothing else, lots of plastic. A plastic bag might take 20 years to break down, but harder, thicker plastics, like toothbrushes, might take 500 years or more to break down.

Elizabeth Bradfield is a poet and naturalist who sees first hand, in her work as a marine educator, the ravaging impacts of plastic on marine life. But she also confronts plastic and our collective addiction to it as a subject of poetry.

Her poem, “Plastic: A Personal History,” is what she calls a “cranky naturalist” poem, which is pretty funny, but embedded in the humor are big questions: how has plastic become part of who we are as individuals and as a species? Now that we know the dangers and devastating effects of plastic production and disposal, how must we change our relationship to this petrochemical product? What kind of world are we making, and what alternatives do we have?

I’m John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Toward Antarctica. She co-edited the newly-released anthology, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and Orion, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Brandeis University and is founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press. She lives on Cape Cod, where she also works as a naturalist and marine educator.

Here is Elizabeth Bradfield reading her poem, “Plastic: A Personal History.”

---

Poem

Elizabeth Bradfield  

“Plastic: A Personal History”

How can I find a way to praise

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Conversation

John Fiege  

Thank you, that's so beautiful. And there's so much going on there, in this poem.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

It's funny it started, this poem started kind of just, you know, as a bitter rant.

John Fiege  

Well, it didn't end there.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

No, it didn't end there.

John Fiege  

So, tell me about that. What's the bitter rant?

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Oh, just plastic. You know? Honestly, the poem started when my friend Sarah, you know, she's my age. I'm 50, 51. And she showed me this little bag her mom made and I started thinking, "Wow, imagine being the generation that discovered plastic, right? Wow, plastic, so handy," tupperware parties, all that stuff, right? And I mean, to be the generation that saw plastic come into use, I was just really thinking about that shift and, and that's where the poem started.

John Fiege  

So I want to just dive into to probably my favorite moment in the poem. So I'm gonna I'm gonna reread this one stanza. You too, must have heard stories now. quaintest carriages have first plastic, pre plastic eras of glass, wax cloth and tin of shared syringes. So that line of shared syringes hit me really hard. You know, prior to this, you mentioned rubber bands and credit cards, and Yo-Yos, and saran wrap, and Girl Scout pouches, all these kind of quaint objects of the past. But shared syringes is like this bomb you drop in the poem, you know, toys, and everyday items, the toils and frivolities of childhood all of a sudden become the life threatening addictions of the teenage years and young adulthood, a plastic addiction that may seem at first to make our lives better, while it slowly kills us. Can you talk about this moment in the poem, like, you know, where did this come from? Maybe, what's going on structurally here that gives this moment in the poem so much weight?

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Well, I think a couple of things, I was, you know, I did just want to imagine and put forth the ground truthing that we did have a world before plastic, right? What did we do? There were these things. And then I was thinking, I was thinking, all right, let's think about the advantages of plastic right of disposable syringes of, you know, the problems of disease being swapped out, the doctor comes to your house, or what you're a morphine addict, or whatever, in the Sherlock Holmes-ian kind of way with his glass syringe. But of course, you didn't throw any of that away, right? And so there is a benefit to plastic, right? There's a danger in this older world, as well as the danger in this present world, and so I wanted that pivot and that shift I didn't want this poem to be. I mean, gosh, you know, I think about what my life would have been like, as a queer woman in the era of wax cloth, and tin, it wouldn't have been so happy. So I was thinking of just the darker shadow of that nostalgia, I suppose. 

John Fiege  

Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to start with nostalgia. And then, I mean, this is the poetry of it. It's that single turn of phrase changes the color, and the tone of everything so quickly. 

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Yeah and I really, you know, there's, I think, you know, how you write a poem. And for me, when I write a poem, it's a journey, right? It's an act of discovery. And a lot of the discovery for me in this poem was through sound, as well as through images. And for me, that rhyme of tin and syringes was a discovery, a linkage, and I think it was same as same as earlier in the poem, you know, plastic, even for gum that we hate the $5 minimum, and that gum minimum, right? These kind of resonances. They kind of they tickle me, you know what I mean? So there's like, the darkness and also the humor for me, and also the delight of sound and all of these things swirling around. 

John Fiege  

Right. Well, you know, the other thing, you know, I got cancer 10 years ago, and, and almost died.  Yeah, it was horrendous, but I'm here. But, you know, I spent two years in treatment, and the number of disposable plastic objects that were discarded in front of me to care just for me, just blew my mind away. And at the same time, it saved my life, you know, and so when I get, you know, you talk about how you started this poem as a rant against plastic. And I find myself in that place frequently. But I guess I try to--I don't know, I guess I try to forgive our society, our humanity sometimes, to say, you know, people weren't trying to destroy the planet when they invented plastic. You know, they were trying to create this miraculous thing that would allow us not to cut down so many trees and, and grow so much cotton and, you know, do all these other things that felt like the limits of the natural world.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Oh, I'm so sorry. Not kill so many whales, right? I mean, that used a pre-plastic material. 

John Fiege  

Exactly. So, you know, I try to remind myself of that. And, you know, you could talk about syringes in kind of a life saving positive way. But you can also talk about them as shared syringes. Which, you know, immediately brings to mind of course, you know, heroin epidemic, and things like that, that have just taken so many lives. So I don't know how, when you were in the midst of the journey for this poem, what were you--how are you weighing those things of the ranch versus kind of checking yourself about nostalgia or other things?

Elizabeth Bradfield  

I think what I love about poems is the ability to hold contradiction, you know? And I, you said, check yourself, and I do try and check myself, I try and think in poems, you know, how am I culpable in this moment? You know, I'm not removed from it. And so I wanted, I wanted those layers of complexity to be in the poem. And I think, you know, it's funny, I wrote this poem, the first draft of it, before the pandemic. I think the first draft was in 2017. And of course, during the pandemic, I've thought only more and more and more about plastic and the way that we've turned toward disposables in order to, you know, prevent contagion and contamination and spreading of disease, through our face masks, or even to-go containers. But I think what I really--what angers me about plastic in our lives, is how thoughtlessly it can enter, right? And I think I wanted a poem that used a little bit of humor, to possibly suggest that we can think twice about some of these things, right? Especially a yo-yo. There are still wooden yo-yos out there, right, there's still, there are glasses that we can use instead of plastic cups, we can--all of these things that we can do. And it's not convenient. And so we don't. And so I thought if I could just play a little and be a little funny, and a little snarky, but also kind of acknowledge these darknesses, that might be a way to just shine a little light.

John Fiege  

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and what I was saying before about, you know, being understanding of, you know, how we didn't really know how bad plastic was when it was invented. But the other side of that coin is--

Elizabeth Bradfield  

But now we do.

John Fiege  

And we're still not doing anything about it. Right? And that's where the, like, the real culpability starts to come of like, you know, what are you doing about it?

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Yeah. Are you going to buy another fleece, is that recycled wood porch really a good thing? You know, the recycled wood?

John Fiege  

Yeah, well, it's got that word recycled in it. 

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Oh, absolutely everything is recycled.

John Fiege  

Well, let me let me reread another stanza. So this is in the middle. Not that long ago, maybe a decade, I made purses for my sisters out of putty colored red lettered plastic Safeway bags, I had snag a stack each time I went. Then fold and sew quilt with bright thread line with thrift store blouses. They were sturdy and beautiful. rain proof and light, clever, so clever. I regret them. So there again, that last line is so cutting, "I regret them." You set us up to see your kind of crafty upcycled purses, as, you know, practical, durable, ecologically responsible. But then you regret them. So I have questions about that. So I see the complicated relationship we have to plastic in this in this section of the poem: It's incredibly durable and malleable and useful, and in some ways, it can allow us to reduce our use of other resources. But there's this dark underside, again, like we were talking about before, to this durability and persistence in the environment, specifically. So maybe you regret stealing a bunch of Safeway bags so you weren't actually upcycling but I was hoping you could just talk a little bit about you know, what do you regret?

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Yeah, I mean, I think to what you were speaking about before when you read that other stanza, too, in terms of form, for folks who haven't seen this poem, there's a there's a dropped line here, right? "Clever, so clever." And then a little bit of space and the next line, "I regret them," drops down, a continuation, but a break. And I wanted that break, you know, that pause and I wanted to allow the poem to be caught up in that kind of delight and joy of making, you know, I was totally broke, I wanted to make something pretty for my sisters. I felt like I was, yeah, upcycling, I suppose, I'm not sure the word existed then, it probably did. But yeah, make something new, free from what was at hand, and I love doing things like that. And I was kind of, you know, a little, a little in love with myself for coming up with this awesome plan. And pulling one over on Safeway.

John Fiege  

Free bags, I'll take some!

Elizabeth Bradfield  

And they were really cute little purses. I'm not a purse kind of person. I wonder if they still have them? I have no idea. But of course, now looking back, I'm like, "Oh my God. That's what I regret," that I would even think of this as a gift to give to, to spend all that time with that plastic, making this thing for my sisters, who I love. What an idiot, you know. And I was just, I was so blind to that at the moment. I was just in love with the making. And, you know, 10 years ago, we knew plastic was bad. But it just it wasn't, I don't know, the alarm bells were not as heightened. I was living at the time in Alaska. And we hardly had recycling. Paper recycling, no. Plastic recycling, no, you know, so even to that extra use adds another another layer, right? But yeah, I was living in a place where even, ostensibly, there was no recycling happening.

John Fiege  

So, you know, you can pay a lot of money right now to buy a fleece that's made from recycled plastic bags. And that is marketed as better than creating new plastic. I can't do the math about you know what the waste is in one direction or the other. But it seems on the surface like "Yeah, that's better. If you're going to have a fleece jacket, that's better." 

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Oh, no. 

John Fiege  

Not at all. You don't even think the recycled fleece is better?

Elizabeth Bradfield  

No, because, okay, wear wool. But also, those fleeces, when you wash them, the microfibers come out, and they go out through your gray water. And they go through if you, you know, if you're on a septic system, they just go right in, if you're on a sewer system, even they escape out, and they go out into the ocean. So I mean, I work on these, I work as a Marine educator and I work you know, help out with some field work with some whales and I work on the local WhaleWatch boats here as a naturalist and I always tell people like, one thing you can do to help save whales is do less laundry, all the stuff that we wash, it all goes out. And so, no, the recycled bottle into a fleece is, I believe, not good.

John Fiege  

Okay, so the better thing is to take that plastic and contain it and never let it release into a water source again.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

I think so.

John Fiege  

And find completely different alternative natural fibers to use.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Yeah, and I mean, we don't need we don't need plastic bottles. We don't need plastic trash liners. I still use a paper liner in my kitchen. You know what I mean? I I don't use shampoo, I use bar soap. I mean, now we're getting to this, like, what do you reduce your plastic footprint? Because there's plenty of plastic in my life. I mean, right here I am on a computer. My headphones that are plastic are plugged into my ears. You know, I'm not a purist in that way. But I do try and think, is there an alternative?

John Fiege  

Well, it's interesting too, because you know, things like upcycling, that's such a hip thing right now. And if you if you look at a lot of the eco fashion kind of world, that kind of all the rage. It's not just about the source of the of the materials, it's about the end destination of the materials. 

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Yeah. 

John Fiege  

Let's jump to the last stanza. 

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Sure. 

John Fiege  

Do you know what I mean? I mean, what pearl forms around a grain of plastic and an oyster. Is it as beautiful, would you wear it? Would you buy it for your daughter? So she in turn could pass it down and pass it down and pass it down. So you end the poem by expanding these questions of our relationship to plastic to questions of time and value and beauty. And finally, you end with the question of what, you know, specifically with a question of: what would you pass down to your daughter? And thinking on that generational level, we pass down fair family heirlooms, or wealth or knowledge or traditions. But we can also pass down ecological devastation, social pathologies, inequalities, a planet polluted by so much plastic junk, and maybe junk disguised as a pearl, that appears to hold meaning, importance, value and beauty. But really, it's rotten or toxic or plastic at its core. So what's going on here at the end, for you?

Elizabeth Bradfield  

I mean, I think for me, that ending is very ironic, because we are passing this down, right? We are passing this down to the generations that follow us. And would that pearl be as beautiful? Probably, if you didn't know what was inside of it. How, you know, how important is it for us to drill down and really examine what we're holding? And what's inside of it? And to really question what's at the heart of what we're carrying? To me, that's a really, really important question.

John Fiege  

Right. Right. So how does this poem fit into the broader context of your work and your life? And in you know, are there any other, kind of, stories around this poem, specifically, that you think are interesting? 

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Well, I kind of consider this poem as a sub-genre of nature poetry, which I call the cranky naturalist poem that I find myself writing quite a bit of, I think there's a lot of poems in, especially my book, once removed, that fall into the cranky naturalist genre. And I mean, I think I write them because I do get cranky. But also, I think they're a little bit funny. And things are so bad that I have to laugh. You know what I mean? I have to laugh, I hope someone else has to laugh too. Because if we're not laughing, then we're turning away. You know, and laughter is a way of engaging, it's a way of being. So I like putting on that posture of the cranky naturalist. And yeah, I do, I work as a naturalist. I work mostly with marine mammals with marine ecology. And so I divide my life between books and boats, basically. And both of those things really feed me and I think a lot about the world that a seal or a whale is swimming through. And the urban ocean, that most of us know, most of us who live on the coasts, whether you're on the East Coast, I live on Cape Cod, or the West Coast, or, you know, the UK, South Africa, Australia, wherever. All of these coasts are very urban coasts. And we, the ocean has been thought of for so long as something that's, you know, "too big to fail." But we're seeing some failures. And it's really concerning to me. So I think a lot about the ocean, which I love so much, you know, that I find inspiration and solace in and has a very complicated human history. Also a really complicated ecological history that we hardly even understand. You know, I mean, we don't even know how long really, humpback whales live. There are so many mysteries out there, and, and we're changing the ocean pretty rapidly. So a lot of my time and thought goes into thinking about ocean ecology, marine ecology.

John Fiege  

And in reality, the oceans are too big to ignore, which is exactly what we do. You know? Yeah. Human history is a history of dumping our waste into a water source, whether that's a river or an ocean, or some other place where it seems to our to our eyes to disappear.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Yeah. And in all honesty, we're all downstream. Right? Exactly. I mean, some people more immediately than others.

John Fiege  

There's no, there's no stream on a sphere.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

That's right. Yeah. So yeah, so In terms of my writing, I read a lot about, there's a little ocean in here, not a ton. But I read a lot about the fulcrum between our social selves and our animal selves, you know, or the other more than human beings that are out there in the world. And I find that a really interesting, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes inspiring, and complicated set of dynamics.

John Fiege  

And you know, if you're going to start a podcast, eventually you're going to have to call it "The Cranky Naturalist."

Elizabeth Bradfield  

My friend Melissa and I, she's a naturalist also. But we had a joke that we should start a podcast called "Wait, wait, don't touch that." All the things that you shouldn't be doing that the naturalist would like, you know, tisk tisk you for doing. Um, number one would be those those recycled fleece sweatshirts.

John Fiege  

Wow, I don't buy those recycled fleece sweatshirts, but I've at least given them the benefit of the doubt that it's better than the alternative. But you, you're right, you're totally right. So, right now, there's so much activism going on around our use of plastic and the ridiculous ubiquity of plastic pollution, single use plastic wasteful packaging, microplastics in the bodies of fish and every other living thing in the ocean. How do you see poetry or other forms of art, in relationship to the activist project of understanding and bringing attention to huge problems like plastic pollution,

Elizabeth Bradfield  

I think what I love about poetry, in addition to so many other things, is that it's really a form that asks us to occupy both the mind and the heart, right, the intellect and the emotion. And that's what we need to do to move forward and make any kind of progress. Thinking isn't enough, we also have to feel, and to help people connect and care. And so I think, if we can write things that keep these conversations alive, and stop us from just numbing over to the things we know, like we know plastic is bad. But if there's--I was at this show the other day, at the Center for Coastal Studies, which is a research and education nonprofit, on Cape Cod and Provincetown. And there was an art show that had a lot of marine debris-inspired of work in it. And one of the one of the images that was so striking to me, I can't remember the name of the artist, but it was a photographer, and she had collected, you know, tennis balls on the beach, which you find so many of and she set them up in this grid and photographed them in this sterile, pristine way. And they were so beautiful, and so strange and made me look at them differently and think about them differently. And I think that is what I think art and poetry can do to just wake us up and make us consider, slow down a little bit of time, hold a little bit of space, and allow us to feel and not just be numbed out by all this information. 

John Fiege  

Right. Yeah, and, you know, ice core data, and, and, you know, carbon dioxide level changes over the last couple of decades, you know, that stuff's really important, but it doesn't, it doesn't make you feel in a direct way. I mean, maybe it has an indirect way of making you feel if you have enough background knowledge about what it means and you can translate it in your own head. But also, I think, besides the feeling is, kind of, a there's a pragmatic side to art, too. You know, you have a poetry reading, and you invite people and they come and it's fun. And you get to hang out with people, you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna read your ice core data to people in a room unless you're at a scientific conference, at a glaciology conference, you know? So it, I mean, for me, also just in this on this very pragmatic level, and just allows us to keep the conversation going, in forms that people are more comfortable with, more excited about, are kind of a positive, beautiful, kind of beneficial side of their experience, rather than something that seems dull and grueling and opaque.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

No, absolutely. I think the energy of a rant or a cranky naturalist poem, for me can be a lot of fun and can be a way to vent frustration and rage that that is really necessary, and then hopefully move on, pick up and move on. Right, I think we look for art not just to help us explore the more difficult realities of our world, but also find energy, solace, inspiration to move on, you know, maybe do something a little bit differently to, to not just sink into despair.

John Fiege  

Yeah. Yeah.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

I think that's really important to me, that poems are part of our greater public discourse. And I think, you know, what you're doing with your podcast is doing that, our conversation is about that also. And, you know, it's not it's not an elite, isolated form, right? Poems want to connect. And they can, and, I welcome every little moment where I see that happening in the world. 

John Fiege  

Awesome. Yeah, I, I have Irish heritage, although I've never been to Ireland. Although I've never been to Ireland, and I'm completely disconnected from the culture and place in a direct way. But, you know, I've heard that, to this day poets are, like, huge celebrities in Ireland, like, every town has their, like, you know, poet laureate, essentially. And it's such a big deal culturally. And then I think about America and how all of our superstars are, you know, from Hollywood or, you know, or like sports or, you know, business moguls. And sometimes ask myself, how would our society be different if the poets were the superstars here?

Elizabeth Bradfield  

I don't know. I think in some circles they are, you know, I was lucky enough to be able to study with the poet Eavan Boland, who's Irish, when I was at Stanford, and I'll never forget her telling us a story of Aer Lingus that the airline for Ireland. They were redesigning their interior cabin and they, I don't know, this kind of cracks me up. But they took one of her poems and wove it into the seat embroidery. And so I just think about all of those people sitting on Eavan Boland's words. And it's kind of gross, and kind of, like, farting into it and all the things that you do on an airplane. But it's also kind of amazing and wonderful that they would want poetry as part of this journey into the sky, too, you know? So yeah, so I wonder the same thing.

John Fiege  

Great. Well, can can you end by reading the poem once again?

Elizabeth Bradfield  

I'd be happy to.

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Poem

Elizabeth Bradfield  

“Plastic: A Personal History”

How can I find a way to praise

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Conversation

John Fiege  

Beautiful. Liz, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been great.

Elizabeth Bradfield  

Thank you for having me. I really, really appreciated this conversation and really enjoyed it, John.

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Outro

John Fiege 

Thank you so much to Elizabeth Bradfield. Go to our website at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can read her poem “Plastic: A Personal History,” see some photographs of her at work as a naturalist and marine educator, and find our book and media recommendations.

This episode was researched and edited by Brodie Mutschler, with additional editing by Sofia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

If you enjoyed my conversation with Elizabeth, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Contact me anytime at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can also support the project, subscribe to our newsletter, and join the conversation.

Art can show us the pain and trauma and suffering of the world, and often it does. But art can also go the other direction. It can reveal the beauty, harmony, and unity of the world.

The canvasses in Salma Arastu’s series of paintings, We Are All One, are full of soft colors, continuous lines, immersive habitats that flow into one another, and—sometimes—two-dimensional representations of humans and animals occupying the same space, echoing cave paintings.

Salma found the continuous line in her study of Islamic calligraphy when she was living in the Middle East. She was born into the Sindhi and Hindu traditions in Rajasthan, India, and then embraced Islam after marrying a Muslim.

It was this continuous line that became a central element of her approach to painting and a central technique she uses to express the ecological views she finds in the Quran.

She seeks to transcend difference through her art and find oneness and interconnectedness in a world that continually ravages ecological systems around the planet.

Since the 1970s, Salma has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally and writing about art. She currently lives in San Francisco, where I had the pleasure of visiting her in her studio and seeing so many of her wonderful paintings.

This episode is part of the Chrysalis Artists series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Salma Arastu

An Internationally exhibited artist, Salma was born into the Sindhi and Hindu traditions in Rajasthan, India. She later embraced Islam and moved to USA in 1986. Her work creates harmony by expressing the universality of humanity through paintings, sculpture, calligraphy and poetry. She was inspired by the imagery, sculpture and writings of her Indian heritage and Islamic spirituality. She was born with a left hand without fingers. Because of her all-encompassing God, she was able to transcend the barriers often set-forth in the traditions of religion, culture, and the cultural perceptions of handicaps.

After graduating in Fine Arts from Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, India, she lived and worked in Iran and Kuwait, where she was exposed to a wealth of Islamic arts and Arabic calligraphy. Calligraphy, miniatures, and the folk art of Islam and the Hindu tradition continue to influence her work today. She has been invited to Germany twice, as a Resident Artist at Schwabisch Gmun in 2000 and by the Westphalia Wilhelm University in Münster to publish her paper “Art Informed by Spirituality” in God Loves Beauty: Post Modern Views on Religion and Art. Further she was invited to Morocco for a one- month Artist Residency Program in March of 2018 through Green Olives art Gallery. She has presented work at Stanford University, Commonwealth of San Francisco, Seattle University, Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, and Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, St. Louis Missouri.

She has displayed at 45 solo shows nationally and internationally and has won many distinctions: the East Bay Community’s Fund for Artists in 2012, and 2014, and 2020, The City of Berkeley’s Individual Artist Grant Award in 2014, 2015, and 2016. She has public art pieces on display in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and San Diego, California and has written and published five books on her art and poetry. Her most recent book deals with ecological consciousness from Quranic verses “Our Earth: Embracing All Communities.”

Selected Works

A more comprehensive collection of work is available here.

Recommended Readings & Media

Salma Arastu Sharing process of her art.

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege

Art can show us the pain and trauma and suffering of the world. And often it does. But art can also go the other direction. It can reveal the beauty, harmony and unity of the world.

The canvases in Salma Arastu’s series of paintings, We Are All One, are full of soft colors, continuous lines, immersive habitats that flow into one another, and—sometimes—two-dimensional representations of humans and animals occupying the same space, echoing cave paintings.

Salma found the continuous line in her study of Islamic calligraphy when she was living in the Middle East. She was born into the Sindhi and Hindu traditions and Rajasthan, India, and then embraced Islam after marrying a Muslim.

It was this continuous line that became a central element of her approach to painting and a central technique she uses to express the ecological views she finds in the Quran. She seeks to transcend difference through her art, and find oneness and interconnectedness in a world that continually ravages ecological systems around the planet.

I'm John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Artists series.

Since the 1970s, Salma has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally, and writing about art. She currently lives in San Francisco, where I had the pleasure of visiting her in her studio last summer and seeing so many of her wonderful paintings. At ChrysalisPodcast.org, you can see some of my photos from that trip and images of her paintings, including those from her We Are All One series.

Here is Salma Arastu.

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Conversation

John Fiege

Could you start by just telling me a little bit about your project, We Are All One?

Salma Arastu

Yes, I believe in oneness. And these are kind of my oneness projects, you know, like, I want to bring the whole humanity together. And in my work, initially, they were abstract figures, you know, that they are coming together in groups, you know, celebrating together, sharing together, chanting together. So this has been my theme always. And from that, you know, gradually, as I was looking around the nature, I live on the bay in this area. And so nature has been great friend, I would say, you know, I keep watching the plants, the water, the clouds every morning. So this has been part of my daily schedule that I look at the nature and absorb it and go to my studio. And so somehow the nature, the the birds, the animals, and the plants, they all got into my work, and I realized we are all one, we are all breathing, we are all connected. So I think gradually I started doing work, which showed all living beings in my work, and I call it We Are All One.

John Fiege

Great. And And can you talk also about Our Earth, and as part of this project, and what did you do there?

Salma Arastu

As a daily practice, I do read Quran, my book of faith. And, you know, suddenly I started noticing the verses, which talk to me about the planet about, you know, like Earth and the communities. So let me tell you the first verse, which really, really was holding me for some time, you know, before I started the project, and that verse was so related to my thinking, we are all one. So that particular verse, it says, “There's not an animal in the earth, nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are communities like you.” So then I went to the description of that verse and amazing results I found because different scholars have given the beautiful description of this verse. And understanding this verse was like a divine invitation to follow the concerns of these all ecologists in our time. So I went deeper into it. And then especially one scholar, Dr. Fred Denny, who said, “The verse presents a paradigm of interconnectedness. Communities necessarily interact with one another. And we are enjoined by the Quran to view the animal world, not merely as parallel to us and organized into communities but signals interconnectedness between their existence and well being and our own, as no community on Earth exist in isolation of the others, and what affects one community ultimately affects other communities.” So this was amazing revelation to me. And then I started you know, noticing these verses which talked about the plants, the mountains, the ships, the see the fish, you know, the ant, bees. It was a beautiful revelation for me, and I started noticing them down and I found 90 verses like that, almost, which is my limited knowledge, you know. Then I started to shorten the list because I really wanted to do this project. I said I want to bring this positive from Quran to the mainstream in the world, so they understand the positive side of Quran.

John Fiege

Oh, that's great. Yeah and it seems like with that project in particular, it's almost a theological process of, it’s almost like through art you have been studying the Quran. Is that accurate?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, I would say through, yeah, through my art, I was reading Quran, in the sense—or from Quran I was doing art. In Quran, the God has ordained us to look at the nature to study the nature, because—I read something here. “Quran describes nature, presents signs of God, as divine is manifest in nature, and guides to study nature as reference to the wisdom of Quran.” So in fact, as I understand, Quran is a textbook, and the nature is a workbook. Believe me, and that's how I worked on it.

John Fiege

Oh wow. That’s great. Yeah and and my understanding of Islamic law is kind of these basic elements of nature, like land, water, fire, forest, light, are all living things, not just humans and animals as living things.

Salma Arastu

Yes, yes.

John Fiege

You have a really interesting relationship to the Quran and to Islam, and to religion in general, really, your parents were Hindus who fled Pakistan during partition, and settled in Rajasthan in India, is that, is that all right?

Salma Arastu

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

John Fiege

But but then you ended up marrying a Muslim man, and living in Iran and Kuwait, and eventually the United States. You've also talked about the importance of your mother, who is a devout Hindu, in your developing spirituality. Can you talk about a bit about this spiritual journey and how it's infused in your art and how it's led you to engage deeply with ecological subjects?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, sure. I think I do give credit to my mother and my bringing up, because though she was, you know, I mean, they were refugees from Pakistan, when I was born in India. So in the sense, though, my father has started the practice, he was a doctor, he was a physician, but he had lost everything like, you know, in Pakistan, and he was very depressed, but my mother was very, very positive thinker. So she always said, things will be fine. I remember, as a child, you know, my father used to be so upset and angry at times and more in the night, you know, say, I have lost everything, they have not given me back anything, so but she would always calm him down. So that's how I'd always seen it. And the other thing she kept telling us, We are all same. And because in Ajmer where I was born, the Rajasthan, the city in Rajasthan, it has the both pilgrimage you know, Hindu and Muslim. So like, she has seen all that. And she always told us, No, we are all one. We are all one actually came from her thought, you know, that we are all connected, we are not different. So I carried that thought all through my life. And when I met my husband, I tried to restrict myself, I tried to hold myself back. But somehow, somehow things happen. So I said, this is the this is the God's will, you know, that I marry this man. So my mother, though she was very disturbed, but she blessed me. And she said, your destiny is with you. But my blessings are with you.

John Fiege

Wow.

Salma Arastu

So this is all I needed. So I got married. And I'm grateful because we have been married for 47 years now. And it has been a blissful journey. Yes, my husband is very supportive of my art. And the family, also, my children also. So somehow, it's a beautiful journey. And I'm very grateful for that.

John Fiege

So when you were living in the Middle East, you began studying Islamic calligraphy. And you discovered the continuous line as you as you call it, you've called it your guiding line and the light that leads you, and I love how this technique of the calligraphic line complements so strongly the themes of unity and connection in your work. Could you talk about calligraphy a bit, what it means to you, how it’s influenced both your art and your ecological thinking?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, so what happened when I did my masters from India, I was doing abstract work, but nature only, you know, it was movements of nature I was doing. I didn't know anything about Islam. I didn't know anything about Quran, I didn't know anything about calligraphy. So when I went to Middle East, I love this calligraphic the continuous line, you know, I used to copy it. And there was one quote from one Islamic scholar who said that the calligraphy starts from the field of action, it starts on right, you know. So it starts from the field of action, and lands in the field of heart. So, it was so beautiful, and I think it stayed with me. And then I started learning Arabic slowly, because, you know, I was curious, what do they say? So then I started making the sense of those words, and I was amazed at this line, how it's making the meaning also. But before I went deeper into the meanings of Quran, this line became my language. And when I came to USA, I continued with those abstract figures and you know, my lines, but then 2001, when this 9/11 happened, after that, I got a jolt, you know, like, it was something, people started asking me because I was known as a Muslim artist, you know, so they would ask me, Is Islam like that? Do you believe in that? So I said, No, my God is same. My God hasn't changed. So he is not Muslim. He is not Hindu. He is not Christian. So he is not like that. It cannot be like that. So there's some, something wrong gone somewhere. So I started learning Quran.

John Fiege

Where were you? Where were you living during that? When 911 happened?

Salma Arastu

I was in Pennsylvania. I was in Pennsylvania.

John Fiege

Okay, so did you see a lot of that? Like, anti-Islamic backlash?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, exactly. Islamophobia. Yeah, because suddenly it happened. And I watched it, and it hurt me also, like, I was in tears, watching the falling of Twin Towers, because I used to visit that place. So I'm just saying it affected me a lot. But then I started learning about Quran. And seriously, it gave me such positive thinking like, such positive verses I have found, you know, which talk about hope and unity and connection and earth. And then now I say that my work is about oneness, connecting humanity, soil and soul. So that is my tagline nowadays, you know?

John Fiege

Awesome.

Salma Arastu

I'm trying to connect humanity, soil and soul. Yes.

John Fiege

That's great. And, you know, one thing I was thinking about is representational and figurative art are generally discouraged in Islamic art. And I think in your early work, it was all abstract. But in, in some of your paintings personally, more recently, you represent plants and animals, and even people, although the people seem to always be faceless in some way, you know, the heads are generally represented with just circles. But I was just wondering how you see your work within the tradition of Islamic art and the precepts that come with that?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, so frankly speaking, I was, I knew about it, people say that, like I did faceless figures without realizing that Islam, it's not allowed. But then I talked to some scholars, and I was told, it's only the sculpture form, because, you know, in Islam, the worship of icons is private. Okay? So it's not that you cannot draw. What he what I was made to understand that if you make a sculpture, and then you make it a human-like, so that is not allowed, like, because you cannot create a human. If you see my work, it's very folk style. That there, I'm not doing exact three dimensional, you know, figures. And even if you go back to books, the miniature paintings, and which talk about the story of Islamic periods, and all that, they are also two dimensional, you know, they’re, nothing is three dimensional. So what I'm trying to say that it is allowed in the story form, in fact, in my book, there's a last page, which a scholar wrote for me, in favor of my work, saying that Islam is allowed. “Prophet Muhammad was known to praise diverse forms of beauty and to have said Allah is beautiful and he loves beauty. All of these meanings and more find the holistic expression in the Quran and Sunnah, and are subtly unveiled, explored and expressed in Salma Arastu’s paintings, and the English translation of the verses presented with them. Through her work cell mitosis encouraging the viewer to contemplate important meanings of unity, justice and balance as well as the impact of human actions the need for oneness and universal care for creation, all of which are indeed among the higher objectives of this Islam.” So that's how I did it. I don't know, I was inspired. I was, rather I would say I was guided to do it like that, and I did it. But so far, I haven't heard any, any criticism on that.

John Fiege

Well, that's great. And you've also described your process as very physical: scratching, sanding, layering materials like paper, rope, modeling paste, paper mache, or copper plate, embroidering with pen and ink. How does the physicality of your technique relate to your work, which is very much about both the physical biological world, but also spiritual existence?

Salma Arastu

I like textures. You know, I don't know, I like the penetrating textures. And some are right from beginning, I used to use paper first, you know, and then I used to, like, glue the paper on the surface and create, you know, textures and then paint gesso on it. And then I work sometimes, I'm a lot of sanding, because I like to show the layers beneath, you know. I don’t know, I'm so physically involved with the work,I mean, that I can't describe, you know, I don't know, it's a new, it's a new experience each day, you know. The new painting that I'm doing, I'm using rust as my paint, I create this rust with a vinegar and aluminum and you know, make them rust, you know, make it rust color, and I paint with that also. So, and I'm using rope in my recent work. So yeah, I love textures. And I like pen and ink, I mean, I don't know it’s the calming me down. You know, when I do the large works, the different works with a lot of physical work and like a lot of textures, then pen and ink is something which calms me down, it brings me back to myself. And it's like a meditation. So all my paintings have some work in pen and ink. It's like embroidery, I call it you know, it's like putting my you know, final touches on my work.

John Fiege

That's great. Well, I'd like to for a minute look at a specific painting, and one of my favorites is called Earth and Skies. And so on one level, when you look at it, it's a traditional landscape painting in the sense that, you know, the bottom half of the canvas is green for the land, the top half is blue for the sky. But when you look closer at it, you realize that the sky is also the ocean and teeming with marine life. There are animal figures, both terrestrial and marine animals. And they, and as with all your work, it's drawn in two dimensions. And in some ways, it's reminiscent of cave paintings, I've found. And the entire canvas has this two dimensional flatness, with no sense of depth at all. And interestingly, there are some human figures in the landscape. It's not this idealized wilderness landscape devoid of humans. But the humans blend into the background and are represented in a similar size and style as the other animals. I also love your color palette, it's all these soft colors that that dissolve into one another. And of course, your your fluid lines are everywhere in the piece. Can you talk a bit about the techniques and concepts behind Earth and Skies? And like how do you create these colors that flow and dissolve into one another and, and, you know, you just your process for for conceiving and and creating this.

Salma Arastu

Sure. So as I told you, I work with very thin acrylics. And my I don't make sketches of my paintings, I go directly on the canvas, and I feel guided you know, like, whatever comes is coming from within me, from within me, from my soul through my hand on the canvas. That's how it is. I don't know what is going to come on the canvas. So that particular theme, the earth and the skies, comes from a verse from Quran which talked about the balance. It said that God has created this establish this balance of earth and water in the skies, and don't disturb that. So, so that was the main concept in my mind when I started working. And somehow these soft colors, they, you know, I started with very thin paint very, very thin pane, and I started drawing animals, fishes, because I'm showing the connection. So for me, the birds, the fishes, the animals that are all part of this balance, you know, even the human figures. Here I want to mention one thing somebody told me recently and I love that concept. The man thinks he's the great and he's the protector, you know, taking care of this earth. While he's not needed to take care of earth, God is taking care of everything. Human being is just part of this whole system. You know, the whole web of life. It’s the ego of the human, you know? So the word I was told that even the caveman knew that human figures don't, don't mean anything, like they are just part of it, because he always, the caveman also drew the figures as the sticks, and did the beautiful drawings of animals.

John Fiege

Right, right.

Salma Arastu

So I really like that concept. I said, that's beautiful. Yeah. So this one, it just developed, as I told you, like, it just happened, you know, like, one layer over another, and another and softly I was going with very light colors, because I, it had to come through that, you know, and then I do a lo ton sanding. So in that painting, I've done a lot of sanding to give it an antique feeling in the bottom part with the figures. And it's a slow process if you ask me. But but it happens very spontaneously.

John Fiege

That's an amazing combination. Slow, but spontaneous.

Salma Arastu

Yes. Because whatever comes out, it comes out. And then I wait, I look at it. And then I go to it again, again throw some color on it, and then come back.

John Fiege

Well, that seems to go back to this idea of the process of art as meditation or contemplation or study. It's like the, the processes.

Salma Arastu

Yeah, it's a dialogue. You know, it's a constant dialogue between the work and artist.

John Fiege

That's awesome. There's a, there's another painting, I really love, The Waves and the Birds. So I love this painting, I just, I just visually love it in the colors. But also, the birds are flying in a flock through, you know, seemingly through the ocean. But it it creates this sense of the parallelism between a flock of birds and a school of fish, because they kind of look like a school of fish swimming through the ocean. Can you talk a bit about that piece? And, and where that came from?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, yes, you know, I walk on the bay, as I told you. So I often see this, you know, swarms of birds, you know, flying in, in fall, you know, they come, the migrant birds, and they sit there, and they are just moving around, you know, it's like a constant flow. The waves and the birds, you know, I don't know, it just remained in my mind. So one day, it came like this on a canvas. So because there's no end, the waves are till the top, you know, because I see the whole bay area, you know, and then I see this burst just going over it. So this painting, it happened again, you know as I told you, they, they just happen for me, I don't plan them. So when I was going to do the birds, you know, I took my pen and ink because I didn't know how to show the birds. You know, I didn't want to mix them with my paint also. So I just did those with pen and ink if you see, so it was a very, I don't know, it just happened. I mean, that's why I always say I'm guided. I don't know why I'm doing it, how they come. But it really came together really well. And I'm so pleased with the composition. I know even I like it.

John Fiege

Yeah, the composition, the composition is amazing.

Salma Arastu

Yeah, thank you.

John Fiege

Often you, I know you write poetry. And, and some of your paintings have been accompanied by poems, both your own poetry I think and I think you sometimes pull text from the Quran and other places. Can you talk about that relationship between poetry and your painting work?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, you know when I'm walking in the morning at the bay, you know, a lot of thoughts come in my mind. I feel so full of inspiration, you know, when I come back, I want to do this today, I want to do this day. So I record my words, and I record my whatever thoughts are coming and come back in my studio. So sometimes first I write the poem, which is which came in the morning, you know, in my mind, and then go to the painting, then start the painting. I don't really sketch but the words you know, sometimes the words helped me to portray what I want to do that, like my thoughts, you know, so they're connected. I know many times poetry happens first, the painting happens, you know, not for every painting, some. And sometimes the painting happens and when I look at it, it gives me the dialogue of in the form of a poem, you know, so, so they're interrelated in my work, and sometimes I'm directly influenced by Rumi's poetry also, because it's very universal. My work is not necessarily Islamic or Hindu or Christian, or American or Indian. I think my work is universal. I'm painting for everyone. And I, this is what I want to be. You know? So that's how I connect myself with Rumi.

John Fiege

Yeah. Well, he is such an interesting figure, as you say, who is admired by so many different groups that see themselves in such strong opposition to one another in the modern world. And we really live in this age of identity and difference, and across the political spectrum it's really in vogue right now to emphasize and amplify difference and division in culture, race, religion, gender, age. But you're really going in the opposite direction, searching for universality, unity, love, and in some ways, those are ideals from the past. But at the same time, it feels like in the cyclical world that we live in, that they—

Salma Arastu

We need that.

John Fiege

Yeah, that's maybe what the future is, as well.

Salma Arastu

Exactly. That’s what I'm hoping for, yes.

John Fiege

How do we, how do we counteract this toxic political and cultural division that we have in the modern age and, and the ecological calamity that comes with it? And how do you how do you think about these issues of identity and difference and universality and unity?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, let me tell you, you know, it pains me, I cry, when I see these things around me, I mean, like this, this is torture, being a such person. And then watching these separations, you know, watching these distances, watching this, more and more split between, you know, nations and communities and races. Like, sometimes, you know, I see other artists doing this pain, oh, painting this, pictures of pain, but I can't do that, you know? I'm so full that I can't describe the pain. I think if I also do the pain, what I'm here for? I want to give hope, I want to give that love, I want to give that, that that feeling of you know, compassion. I have done few paintings, which depict the moment of the pain sometimes, but then it makes me cry. I said no, I cannot do this for long. I have to give the hope. I cannot do the same like everybody else is doing. What is my existence then? So think I, I don't know, I feel I'm here to give some message of love.

John Fiege

Right? Yeah. And you've talked in about your work in terms of, you know, this bringing together of Eastern and Western traditions. You know, you're using a lot of Western techniques in your work, but then you're bringing in a lot of these philosophies and approaches to the world that that are much more associated with the East.

Salma Arastu

Yes. Yeah, that's a beauty. You know, I love this western world because I've learned so much, you know. I mean, I have been influenced by art from West, I have loved these techniques, the new new techniques I learn every day. I mean, there's so much to learn, I can't keep up with everything. But I say my what I want to say. So, and just naturally, I'm not emphasizing, I'm not forcing myself to do it, as I told you, I just do what comes from within me and just from through my hand on the canvas, so I just continue like that, you know, because I have surrendered myself to the Creator.

John Fiege

Right. Well, I think when you look at the paintings, you can see this spiritual process, which I find really amazing.

Salma Arastu

Thank you.

John Fiege

And the, you know, the deep contemplation just infuses your work, which is, which is really beautiful.

Salma Arastu

Thanks. Thank you, I really appreciate, yeah.

John Fiege

So your, some of your new work that's that I think is coming out of the same project is these paintings around mycelial networks, which are the, you know, the white fungal threads that create these vast underground fungal networks that scientists have recently discovered to be really critically important to communication and nutrient flow and, and ecological connections between lots of species of plants and animals. And, and, and one of my favorite paintings, you know, you described earlier how you're working with rust, but it's got this rust background and these bright white mycelial networks. Yeah, and I love it. And it's just so just the colors and the textures, even on a computer screen are so striking. Can you tell me about the origins of this mycelial work and what mycelia have taught you about ecological connection and regeneration?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, so you know what happened when I finished my project Our Earth in 2021, and then I, you know, I can't stop myself. So I started looking for the solutions now. I know these are the problems, these are the happening things. But now how do I find a solution? So I started reading science. I never did before. But you know, I saw this Fantastic Fungi. Have you seen that movie?

John Fiege

Oh, I haven't seen the movie. But I've read–

Salma Arastu

Oh, yeah. So what happened, when I saw those mushrooms and when I learned about the how they're beneficial, so mycelia seem to be giving the better future you know. That if only we concentrate and look at it and learn from it and support these organizations who are doing research on it. They're trying to make plastic like things from mycelia, I want to make people aware of it. You know, being an artist, I can creatively create those images which will attract people and they'll ask me what it is. So and especially it again, line, I have been so involved with these lines, you know, I'm so enjoying them, the roots and entangled life and then I'm reading some books also which are inspiring me. Entangled Life is a beautiful book, which talks about this mycelium, you know, how it changed my perspective, changed my thinking that we can be saved, the humanity can be saved.

John Fiege

Yeah, I love how art and science are coming together so much right now in the culture. And we're starting to break down these really hard divisions that that I feel like existed for many decades.

Salma Arastu

Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

John Fiege

But if you I mean, look at the you know, Leonardo da Vinci, you know, he was doing art and science. I mean, there was no division back then.

Salma Arastu

And then we created division, you know, slowly, yeah. The colonization of the world, you know, that created these things, I think.

John Fiege

And, you know, through this artistic journey you've been on, what do you feel like you've learned about what our relationship to the rest of nature needs to be and how to get there?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, since I would say, 12 years, 15 years, I've been walking around this bay, and it's only two miles radius. But believe me, in this short walk only, I have found every morning, something new, something new light, something new bird, some sometimes new plant and sometimes the entangled forms on the ground, the roots, the, you know, lichens them, you know, like, imagine, I can’t, you can't imagine the images that I've collected over this years. It’s thousands of images. And so this is what my joy, and I think if only people can connect with nature, they will find the joy also, it’s biophilia, you know, it’s that you know, it's something people will find joy once you connect with nature. We are born to be like that, you know, outside, we are not born to be inside the apartments and the rooms and the television screens. We are we are we are supposed to be outside, you know, and mingle with the nature. So that will give you the blessings you, that will make you realize the blessings you have around you.

John Fiege

Yeah, well, that's a beautiful place to end. Salma, thank you so much for for joining me today. It's been really, really great conversation.

Salma Arastu

Thank you so much, really. I appreciate you understanding my work, and that's what I want. I want to share my work and I want people to understand that.

---

Outro

John Fiege

Thank you so much to Salma Arastu. Go to our website that ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can see images of her paintings, the photographs from my visit to her studio, and our book and media recommendations.

This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Brodie Mutschler and Sofia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Juan Garcia.

If you enjoyed my conversation with Salma, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Contact me anytime at chrysalispodcast.org, where you can also support the project, subscribe to our newsletter, and join the conversation.

I’m continually amazed by the immensity of the world that a small poem can conjure. In just a few lines or words, or even just a line break, a poem can travel across time and space. It can jump from the minuscule to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. And in these inventive leaps, it can create, in our minds, new ideas and images. It can help us see connections that were, before, invisible.

John Shoptaw has conjured such magic with his poem, “Near-Earth Object,” combining the gravity of mass extinction on Earth with the quotidian evanescence of his sprint to catch the bus.

John Shoptaw grew up in the Missouri Bootheel. He picked cotton; he was baptized in a drainage ditch; and he worked in a lumber mill. He now lives a long way from home in Berkeley, California, where I was lucky enough to visit him last summer.

John is the author of the poetry collection, Times Beach, which won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in poetry. He is also the author of On The Outside Looking Out, a critical study of John Ashbery’s poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

John has a new poetry collection coming out soon, also called Near-Earth Object.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

John Shoptaw

John Shoptaw is a poet, poetry reader, teacher, and environmentalist. He was raised on the Missouri River bluffs of Omaha, Nebraska and in the Mississippi floodplain of “swampeast” Missouri. He began his education at Southeast Missouri State University and graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia with BAs in Physics and later in Comparative Literature and English, earned a PhD in English at Harvard University, and taught for some years at Princeton and Yale.  He now lives, bikes, gardens, and writes in the Bay Area and teaches poetry and environmental poetry & poetics at UC Berkeley, where he is a member of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative. Shoptaw’s first poetry collection, Times Beach (Notre Dame Press, 2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and subsequently also the 2016 Northern California Book Award in Poetry; his new collection, Near-Earth Object, is forthcoming in March 2024 at Unbound Edition Press, with a foreword by Jenny Odell.

Both collections embody what Shoptaw calls “a poetics of impurity,” tampering with inherited forms (haiku, masque, sestina, poulter’s measure, the sonnet) while always bringing in the world beyond the poem. But where Times Beach was oriented toward the past (the 1811 New Madrid earthquake, the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the 1983 destruction of Times Beach), in Near-Earth Object Shoptaw focuses on contemporary experience: on what it means to live and write among other creatures in a world deranged by human-caused climate change. These questions are also at the center of his essays “Why Ecopoetry?” (published in 2016 at Poetry Magazine, where a number of his poems, including “Near-Earth Object,” have also appeared) and “The Poetry of Our Climate” (forthcoming at American Poetry Review).

Shoptaw is also the author of a critical study, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Harvard University Press); a libretto on the Lincoln assassination for Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin (recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project); and several essays on poetry and poetics, including “Lyric Cryptography,” “Listening to Dickinson” and an essay, “A Globally Warmed Metamorphoses,” on his Ovidian sequence “Whoa!” (both forthcoming in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination at Bloomsbury Press in July 2023).

“Near-Earth Object”

By John Shoptaw

Unlike the monarch, though

Recommended Readings & Media

John Shoptaw reading from his collection Times Beach at the University of California, Berkeley.

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege

I’m continually amazed by the immensity of the world that a small poem can conjure. In just a few lines or words, or even just a line break, a poem can travel across time and space. It can jump from the minuscule to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. And in these inventive leaps, it can create, in our minds, new ideas and images. It can help us see connections that were, before, invisible.

John Shoptaw has conjured such magic with his poem, “Near-Earth Object,” combining the gravity of mass extinction on Earth with the quotidian evanescence of his sprint to catch the bus.

I’m John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series.

John Shoptaw grew up in the Missouri Bootheel. He picked cotton; he was baptized in a drainage ditch; and he worked in a lumber mill. He now lives a long way from home in Berkeley, California, where I was lucky enough to visit him last summer. You can see some of my photos from that visit at ChrysalisPodcast.org, alongside the poem we discuss on this episode.

John is the author of the poetry collection, Times Beach, which won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in poetry. He is also the author of On The Outside Looking Out, a critical study of John Ashbery’s poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

John has a new poetry collection coming out soon, also called Near-Earth Object.

Here is John Shoptaw reading his poem, “Near-Earth Object.”

---

Poem

John Shoptaw 

“Near-Earth Object”

Unlike the monarch, though

the asteroid also slipped

quietly from its colony

on its annular migration

between Jupiter and Mars,

enticed maybe by

our planetary pollen

as the monarch by my neighbor’s

slender-leaved milkweed.

Unlike it even when

the fragrant Cretaceous

atmosphere meteorized

the airborne rock,

flaring it into what might

have looked to the horrid

triceratops like a monarch

ovipositing (had the butterfly

begun before the period

broke off). Not much like

the monarch I met when I

rushed out the door for the 79,

though the sulfurous dust

from the meteoric impact

off the Yucatán took flight

for all corners of the heavens

much the way the next

generation of monarchs

took wing from the milkweed

for their annual migration

to the west of the Yucatán,

and their unburdened mother

took her final flit

up my flagstone walkway,

froze and, hurtling

downward, impacted

my stunned peninsular

left foot. Less like

the monarch for all this,

the globe-clogging asteroid,

than like me, one of my kind,

bolting for the bus.

---

Conversation

John Fiege 

Thank you so much. Well, let's start by talking about this fragrant Cretaceous atmosphere that metorizes the airborne rock, which is is really the most beautiful way I've ever heard of describing the moment when a massive asteroid became a meteor, and impacted the earth 66 million years ago, on the Yucatan Peninsula. And that led to the extinction of about 75% of all species on Earth, including all the dinosaurs. This, of course, is known as the fifth mass extinction event on earth now, now we're in the sixth mass extinction. But but this time, the difference is that the asteroid is us. And, and we're causing species extinctions at even a much faster rate than the asteroid impact did, including the devastation of the monarch butterfly, which migrates between the US and Mexico not far from the Yucatan where the asteroid hit. And in your poem, these analogies metaphors parallels, they all bounce off one another. parallels between extinction events between humans and asteroids between planets and pollen, between monarch eggs and meteors between the one I absolutely love is the annular migration of asteroids in the annual migration of monarchs. But in some ways, the poem puts forward an anti analogy a refutation of these parallels you know, you say multiple times things like unlike the, monarch unlike it, not much like the monarch less like the monarch. So So what's going what's going on here? You're you're giving us these analogies and then and then you're taking them away.

John Shoptaw 

The ending of Near Earth Object is a culmination of fanciful comparisons. In this regard it resembles Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. And you probably know this, John, And that poem proceeds—Shakespeare’s—through a series of negative similarities, which I call dis-similes. And at the end, the poem turns on a dime in the final couplet, which is, “and yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she belied with false compare.” Now, I didn't have Shakespeare's poem in mind—probably good—when I wrote Near Earth Object, but I was certainly familiar with it. And my poem goes through a series of far-fetched similarities between a monarch butterfly and the Chicxulub asteroid, we follow the lifecycles of these two and then a third character, the first person I enters the poem comes out the door, and then gets, you know, hit by the asteroid monarch on penisular left foot. That turn at the end, to comparing the asteroid to me, one of my kind, would seem equally farfetched. What can I have to do with the globe-clogging asteroid? Before climate change, the answer would have been nothing. This poem couldn't have been understood, wouldn't have made sense. Now, we're caught out by the unlikely similarity that, you know, humankind has the geologically destructive potential of the life-altering asteroid.

John Fiege 

I love that the idea of that turn partially because it's so much pulls out the power of poetry, and the power of poetic thinking, where, you know, so much environmental discourse is around rationality, of making rational, reasonable arguments about this is how things are, this is how things ought to be. But when you have this kind of turn, you're you're kind of highlighting the complexity, and the complicated nature of understanding these things, which are really complex. And it really, you know, in such a short poem, you can encapsulate so much of that complexity, which I think benefits our ultimate understanding of, of what we're grappling with, with these environmental questions.

John Shoptaw 

Yeah, that's very well put. I think that this poem is a kind of psychological poem as well, and that I'm playing on the readers expectations. And I think the reader probably has less and less faith in this persona, who keeps keeps being lured into these weird comparisons between the asteroid and and the and the monarch butterfly. And then at the end, we're thinking, well, this, too, is absurd. And then we're caught up, like I say, and that's the psychological turn, you know, early on, when people and people still many people doubt. The existence of climate change. It's just  because of a matter of scale. How can we affect Mother Nature, right? It's so big, it's so overwhelming. It does what it wants. We're just little features on this big, big planet. So that it's so counterintuitive. So that's why yes, we grapple and this poem is meant to take you through that kind of experience. That without saying that explicitly, and I think that's something that, yeah, it sets this apart from both the psychological essay and an environmental essay,

John Fiege 

Right the other line I want to pull out of this is slender leaved milkweed. Which I love. and there is a musicality to it. How do you about that? sonorous aspect of the poem and the musicality and the rhythm of it.

John Shoptaw 

Yeah, Thank you for that question. Its one of the ways I beleive that poetry is like music. We do have a musicality and one of the wonderful things about poetry and music is that it it works below the level of meaning. A way a song often does. You know you often will before you even know all the words will get the song. And understand what the song is comunicating and sometimes I am communicating delicacy in slender leaved milkweed. Not only by the image, but by the sound. Its a quiet line. Whereas when I say airborne rock, that's very tight. And very definitive, like globe clogging asteroid or bolting for the bus. These are dynamics that I can play with, and I can accentuate them by changing the rhythms making to very hard plosive as an explosion, you know, b sounds far from each other. And this is something that poetry can do, that prose can't. So well. And that, you know, it's one reason why you have soundtracks and film to help bring things across.

John Fiege 

Yeah, and then in the midst of, of some of these grand images that you have in the poem of like monarch colonies and asteroid colonies, there's also your presence, and the glimpse of them of what seems like a moment in your life, potentially, you run out the door and catch the 79 bus, which goes through Berkeley where you live. And and you encounter a monarch butterfly, which also has a California migration route. The monarch impacts your, as you say, stunned, peninsular left foot. And so now you're shifting the metaphor from human as asteroid to human as Yucatan peninsula, which is the site the site of the impact. And the way you you play with scale. In this poem, I find quite remarkable moving from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars to your foot. And in your peninsular foot makes me feel as if humans are both the perpetrators of the sixth mass extinction, but also one of its victims. And so I was curious, was this moment with the butterfly is something that actually happened? And how do you understand it? In relation to that, you know, this small moment with the butterfly? How do you understand that in relation with the broader context of the poem?

John Shoptaw 

Yeah, thank you. I, I think, one way I proceed. And in poetry, which is something like chance operations that John Cage and poets following John Cage would use as I become very receptive to things happening around me. And if something happens around me while I'm writing a poem, then it gets to come in the poem, at least I am receptive to that possibility. And as I was going for the bus one day, on the walkway, I came across a dead monarch butterfly was very startled to see it. And I thought, Oh, my God, that pet needs to be in the poem, this butterfly has fallen out of the sky like the asteroid. And so and it turned out that the third thing I needed to link our personal, small felt scale with the astronomical and the geological timescale. And it's exactly the problem of scale, both in space and time. I'm constantly zooming in and zooming out. I actually wrote one poem in which I compare this surreal or unreal feeling that we have, if not a knowledge but a feeling of climate change behind the weather as a hit the Hitchcock zoom, where the background suddenly comes into the foreground, right?

John Fiege 

Yeah, and it seems like, you know, the problem of climate change is a problem of scale like, like it's so it's so foreign to our kind of everyday human senses of, of what is danger, and what is something we should be concerned about or care about it. And that problem of scale both, both spatially and temporally. It really prevents us from wrapping our heads around what it means and how to respond.

John Shoptaw 

It does. That's our challenge. I take it as my challenge, for the kind of poetry I write. And I think of of poetry as a science of feelings. And one of the feelings I'm thinking about and trying to understand and work through is denial. You know, people usually think of denial as refusal, you refuse to admit, but look at the facts just face the facts. But as you say, climate is on such a different scale. It's often a problem of incomprehension.

John Fiege 

Yeah, and I think this idea of denialism I mean, we tend to talk about it in very narrow terms of, you know, people of particular political persuasions deny the existence of climate change. And that's one like, very narrow view of denialism. But it really pervades everything in our culture, you know, anyone who eats a hamburger, or flies on a plane, or, or even turns on their, their heat in their house, you know, is is in is kind of implicated in some system of denial. That, you know, ultimately, our societies completely unsustainable. And we have to function we have to move forward, even though even if we know how problematic those various things are. And so just living in the world requires, you know, some sense of denialism.

John Shoptaw 

It does, if you think of the word we commonly used today, adaptation, though, it's really another word for denial. If you see what I mean, we're, we're moving into accepting, partially accepting the reality as it is, so we can live into it. And again, if we think of relativity, flying less, not giving up flying, emitting less, not stopping all the way emissions on a dime, right, but moving as fast as we possibly can, these are things we can do and without being incapacitated by despair. And again, I think, you know, hope and despair are two other very fundamental concepts that poets if they're serious about feeling, can think about and think through and help people we understand.

John Fiege 

Yeah, and I love this idea of impurity that you bring in. Not just with poetry, but, you know, I feel like environmentalism in general is, it's really susceptible to this kind of ideology of purity. And it becomes about, you know, checking all the boxes of, of, you know, lifestyle and beliefs and votes and all kinds of things where solutions, solutions don't come with some kind of attainment of purity. They come with it a shift of a huge section of the way the culture works. And that's never going to be perfect or consistent or anything. It's going to be imperfect, and it's going to be partial, but it can still move.

John Shoptaw 

That's right. So when people say net zero, carbon offsets, recycling, this is all greenwashing. I say, listen to the word all. Yes, there is some greenwashing going on there. There is some self promotion and maintenance of one's corporate profile at work. But there's also good being done. You can recycle aluminum, and you get 90% aluminum back. You can recycle plastic, you get 50% back, but you still get 50% back.

John Fiege 

Well, in the poem, you also give life to what we ordinarily see as inanimate objects. So let me let me reread a section of the poem enticed maybe by our planetary pollen as the monarch by my neighbor's slender leaves milkweed unlike it, even when the fragrant Cretaceous atmosphere media rised the airborne rock, flaring it into what might have looked to the horrid Triceratops like a monarch ovipositing. So in your words, the lifeless, inanimate asteroid is given life and a soul really? Why take it in that direction?

John Shoptaw 

To make it real, to make it real for us. And you will see poets, giving a voice to storms to extreme weather events, seeing things from potentially destructive point of view. And that's what I was doing here is seeing things fancifully from the the meteor’s point of view, but I wanted to give that personification to make the link that this is personal. What's happening at this scale, is still personal, it still has to do with us and links with us.

John Fiege 

Yeah, and you wrote this great piece for Poetry Magazine called “Why Eco Poetry” and you bring up these these topics a bunch. And there's one line. I really love, you say, to empathize beyond humankind, eco-poets  must be ready to commit the pathetic fallacy and to be charged with anthropomorphism could could you explain this, this concept of John Ruskin's pathetic fallacy and how you've seen these issues play out?

John Shoptaw 

I think Ruskin had certainly the good sense of what the natural world was. And many artists and poets laziness, when it came to the describing the natural world. storms were always raging, winds were always howling, the words were always that's really what he was getting at. And I appreciate that. You want to make these things real, right. But there is there is a place for pathetic fallacy. But on the other hand, strategically, we often need for that monologue of the lyric poem, to be overtaken by this larger voice, almost like a parental voice from on high, speaking to us and saying, Listen to me, this is real. This is happening. I'm out here. Right? So you've forced me to take over your poem and talk to you about anthropomorphism is, is related phenomenon. And it's it's a word that I, I still find useful and making us really consider and experience the outside world, the world, particularly of other creatures, as they actually are. However, it's a belief it's not a scientific idea. And the idea being that we are ascribing qualities or human qualities to animals or plants, or even inanimate objects, like like meteors. When in fact, when it comes to animals, for instance, we're often identifying qualities behaviors, actions, motivations, we share anyone who owns pets knows pet they have a range of feelings that to say, my dog is happy. My dog is bored. My dog is feeling bad because it feels it's disappointed me in some way, you know, these things are real. And you need to act accordingly to keep things going along. In the canine / human cup, you know, partnership that you have going there.

John Fiege 

Yeah, Descartes must not have had any dogs or cats or ever encountered another animal besides a human in his life.

John Shoptaw 

That's right. It's partly, you know, one feels, how can we know that other world? We shouldn't be so arrogant in our knowledge. And so it seems like we're being modest, and it's a good thing. And we have this anthropological attitude toward the relativity of, you know, consciousness. On the other hand, it's a form of denial, right? anthropomorphism is a form of denial of what we share and poets need to overcome that denial.

John Fiege 

You mean, you mean anti-human anti-anthropomorphism?

John Shoptaw 

Yeah, it's what I know. We don't have the language for it. We don't have that word of the problem.

John Fiege 

Anti-anthropomorphism, it just slips right off your tongue.

John Shoptaw 

That's right.

John Fiege 

Well this point you make about anthropomorphism reminds me really strongly of a story. I've heard Jane Goodall tell many times, she was hired to observe chimpanzees in the wild, and she gave them names. But she was reprimanded by by many in the scientific community, who said, a researcher should use numbers to identify chimps or any other animals they're studying, because scientists must be dispassionate to not confuse animal behavior with human behavior. And she identifies one of her most significant contributions to science as recognizing the individuality and personality and really the souls of non human animals. And that recognition fundamentally changed. Our scientific understanding of chimps and other animals in allow these massive breakthroughs in the field. And you seem to be arguing that with poetry, we're in a similar place in relation to the Earth where we need to find a new language that allows us to empathize more profoundly with the other than human residence of the planet. Does that sound? Does that sound right to you?

John Shoptaw 

Very much, and really, with thinking and realizing that I'm an animal, as a human being. brought on a conceptual paradigm shift for me, unlike anything I've experienced, in my adult life, everything changed. And when I think, what are the animals think about this? How are they dealing with climate change? Etc. It's always revelatory for me to ask that kind of question. I'm looking at a book by Jane Goodall right now on my shelf called the Book of Hope. And something I've been thinking about a lot in relation to this, because animals have not given up and they don't give up until they they have to. An animal with say, a song bird in the clutch of a hawk knows it's over, and you shut down in order to minimize the pain and suffering. They know that, but they know not to do that prematurely. And I think, you know, often we met we think of hope and despair, as antonyms, but they're very intertwined with each other. I mean, the word despair, contains hope. It means that the loss of hope and there as there is a sense of false hope, where you, you keep hoping beyond the point of hope, where reality tells you there's no point in hoping there's also what I would call a premature despair. I don't know if you have run across the Stockdale paradox. I find it helpful. There's a writer on Jim Collins, who talked to Admiral Stockdale who was taken prisoner of war in Vietnam. And he, he survived through seven years and several incidents of torture. And he said, he was asked by Jim Collins, well, who didn't survive? And he said, well, the optimists who said the optimists were saying, Oh, we're going to because we're gonna be led out by Christmas. In the winter that didn't happen and say, Oh, well, we'll be released by Easter. When that doesn't happen and Christmas comes around again. They die. They die of a broken heart.

John Fiege 

Oh, wow. I have heard that in broad terms. I don't remember that story, though. That's great.

John Shoptaw 

Yeah, and the paradox is that you have hope, which is resolute. It's not pie in the sky hope, but it's hope that faces reality. And it's hoped that is more like courage. It's more like resoluteness hope. Hope is not easy. And it does not deny despair, and even allows you to relax for a moment and maybe weep. Maybe you say, Oh, my God, it's over. Before you come back and say, No, I'm still here. I can still help I can do what I can.

John Fiege 

Right, right. Yeah, and I love how you say that. Eco poetry can be anthropomorphic, but it cannot be anthropocentric, which which flips both of these assumptions that are so deeply embedded in our culture.

John Shoptaw 

Now, maybe I could say something about anthropocentrism.

John Fiege 

Yeah, for sure.

John Shoptaw 

It's a word that, I think is maybe in the dictionary now, but maybe not so familiar word, but you know, thinking of everything in the world, a revolving around us and and the universe. We're the universe's reason for being right. That would be the kind of the strongest sense of anthropocentrism

John Fiege 

Another another form of heliocentrism.

John Shoptaw 

Yes, that's right. That's absolutely right. That's why I one reason why I, at the beginning of Near Earth Objects, see things for the asteroids point of view, right? To give that kind of scale, but also shifting perspective. On the other hand, lyric poetry is inevitably anthropocentric. We as humans are inevitably anthropocentric. So our moving out of anthropocentrism in poetry is always going to be relative and strategic, and rhetorical and persuasive, never absolute.

John Fiege 

Right and totally. Well, another interesting issue you confront in the article is didacticism and the risks of moralism in eco-poetry. And in talking about this, you evoke two poets. The first is Archibald MacLeish, the renowned modernist poet who wrote "a poem should not mean but be." But then you write, poetics wasn't always this way, for Horace, a poem both pleases and instructs. And I feel like this issue of moralism, and didacticism goes way beyond poetry to encompass environmentalism more broadly. How can a poem please instruct without preaching and being didactic?

John Shoptaw 

Yes, that's, that's a question. Where there's no single answer every poem, for me poses the question differently. And part of the excitement part of the experimental nature of poems is you find a new answer every time to that problem, how not to be preachy, but to leave readers in a different place at the end of the poem, than they were at the beginning. my poem to move people from unlike to less like., if I if I can get them there, in a poem, I have moved him in a way and that's enough for me.

John Fiege 

Well, let's look at the end of the poem. You write less like the monarch for all this, the globe clogging asteroid than like me, one of my kind bolting for the bus? It seems in some ways that you might be settling on an analogy in the midst of of all these intersecting parallels, the asteroid is less like the monarch and more like us, us who have killed the monarchs. Where Where do you feel like the poem lands in terms of making a statement like this and and offering up many conflicting ideas that readers have to contemplate themselves?

John Shoptaw 

What would I say? I think when it comes to guilt or responsibility, as I was saying before, we don't want to think in absolute terms, where I'm as guilty as Exxon, I am not. But I still am right. I am still part of this, this world. That monarch butterfly died naturally after it planted its eggs. Its its, its days, her days were numbered. So, that that is part of this. But yet, I do. I do want to say and this is part of, I think, part of the one of the gestures of poetry in the Anthropocene, the era of climate change, a gesture of saying, I take responsibility, I take responsibility. And this is, this is one of the problems of saying, I give up, you know, there's no point in doing any more. We don't have that option. It's irresponsible to give up to ever give up. So I still, though want to say, even something who that has global potential for damage is connected with me good little me, had taking taking the bus because I'm wondering, I'm one of humankind, and we have this destructive potential. And on the other hand, we have this corresponding responsibility.

John Fiege 

Yeah. And looking back on the title of the poem, it feels as if we, as humans, have what you might call like, a dual contradictory existence? As, as both we're both Earth objects. And we're near Earth objects. Oh, what do you what do you think about that?

John Shoptaw 

Yes, I do. I like that ambiguity. I think, one of the, one of the chances, and the happy accidents of the monarch appearing in my poem, as I was writing it, without planning to have a monarch in it, one of the accidents was to take the monarch also, as a Near Earth Object Near Earth Object is one of these scientific concepts of usually a very large object, like a, like a comet, or an asteroid entering the Earth's gravitational pull. With potentially hazardous effects. But, you know, it can be anything near the earth. And if you take object, also in the title as a goal, my object is to bring us near the earth. not have us simply abstract ourselves, how do we do that - we abstract ourselves by saying, we're special.

John Fiege 

I really like that too, because that also ties into this question of scale. You know, you can be near the earth by being, you know, 1000 miles away. Or you can be near the earth by hovering, you know, centimeters over it. And it can be conceptual to, you can be oblivious to the fact that you live on Earth, or you can be extremely aware that you are of in within and near the earth at all times. Yeah, I really like that. That's beautiful. I love how so many meanings come from this tiny little poem?

John Shoptaw 

Well, may I say I was not in a godlike position with this poem. For me. poems are like gardens and that they're less intended and tended, and they they grow of their own and I just tried to be the best collaborator with the poem that I can and not to ignore when it's trying to tell me something like, I need a monarch in here. Not to ignore that.

John Fiege 

Yeah. Well, can you end by reading the poem once again. I can thank you very much.

---

Poem

John Shoptaw 

“Near-Earth Object”

Unlike the monarch, though

the asteroid also slipped

quietly from its colony

on its annular migration

between Jupiter and Mars,

enticed maybe by

our planetary pollen

as the monarch by my neighbor’s

slender-leaved milkweed.

Unlike it even when

the fragrant Cretaceous

atmosphere meteorized

the airborne rock,

flaring it into what might

have looked to the horrid

triceratops like a monarch

ovipositing (had the butterfly

begun before the period

broke off). Not much like

the monarch I met when I

rushed out the door for the 79,

though the sulfurous dust

from the meteoric impact

off the Yucatán took flight

for all corners of the heavens

much the way the next

generation of monarchs

took wing from the milkweed

for their annual migration

to the west of the Yucatán,

and their unburdened mother

took her final flit

up my flagstone walkway,

froze and, hurtling

downward, impacted

my stunned peninsular

left foot. Less like

the monarch for all this,

the globe-clogging asteroid,

than like me, one of my kind,

bolting for the bus.

---

Conversation

John Fiege 

John, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been fabulous.

John Shoptaw 

Thank you, John, for the opportunity. And I love conversing with you.

---

Outro

John Fiege 

Thank you so much to John Shoptaw. Go to our website at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can read his poem “Near-Earth Object” and also see some of my photographs of him at his house in Berkeley and find our book and media recommendations.

This episode was researched by Elena Cebulash and Brodie Mutschler and edited by Brodie Mutschler and Sofia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Sarah Westrich.

If you enjoyed my conversation with John, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Contact me anytime at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can also support the project, subscribe to our newsletter, and join the conversation.