theclimateconversations

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Applications Blog Reflection

I have utilized this Applications in Climate and Society blog as an opportunity to do a close reading of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson. I have also explored topics I am interested in climate justice, advocacy, and colonialism. Having a place for a more slow-paced reflection in climate issues amidst the chaos of the world has become almost a meditation in reading and thought. At the end of the day, I have realized that there is more than meets the eye for every issue imaginable, and I have even begun to believe (just a little bit) in policy action. I am still the scientist and activist I was when I started this blog, but I now have a more multifaceted perspective to add on to climate issues.

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Community Survival, Resilience, and Wisdom

"Much of the space we call 'the climate movement' appears to be modeled after the same systems of inequity and separation we are attempting to change, undo, or outright dismantle. Massive NGOs stick to traditional advocacy methods, techniques that aren't too disruptive or unfamiliar to the philanthropy they need to ensure hundreds or even thousands of paychecks and programs. Language like 'front lines', 'grassroots', 'youth leadership', and 'inclusivity' float over wineglasses at lavish funder gatherings. In such settings, the horizontal patterns of community that build connections and translate wisdom flicker dimly, outranked by the need to know who holds the purse strings and whose name you should know."

Sacred Resistance by Tara Houska, in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Working for the community is not only being adjacent to it during working hours; it means putting in the work and actually understanding, embracing, and immersing yourself into the realities of the daily injustices and long-term harm that these communities have faced. It also means understanding these communities as not just victims, but as champions of resilience. I speak to Black, Latinx, Indigenous, immigrant communities that have been through racism, colonization, occupation, and discrimination time and again. These communities not only have managed to survived the systemic oppression in this world, but also have found a way to thrive despite it. Resilience is built into the bones of BIPOC, and community strengths and initiative speak to this. When the government is unresponsive, communities mobilize. When there are no resources, elders know the way through generation knowledge that can bring forth a solution. When landscapes and ecosystems are being destroyed, communities know how to adapt despite being in mourning for the flora and fauna. When climate change takes its toll, its nothing that indigenous communities haven't seen before; it's just another wave of disaster in the timeline.

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Policy negotiations: for the people?

"Listen to the communities most affected by environmental impacts when crafting policy, because nobody knows better the nuances of our struggles, or the solutions that will lead to a more equitable future, than those affected. [...] If we dare to listen, we can embrace climate policy as a living document- an evolving, improving set of ideas. If our planet is built upon fluid systems and cycles, why shouldn't the policies we put in place to protect it be the same?"

Maggie Thomas, The Politics of Policy, for All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Thomas speaks of policy that fears change, politicians that fuel their own egos, and the real people being affected by climate change that are left behind. Policy can be useful if it actually takes in the input of communities that need regulations the most: those that are being poisoned within their own homes, exposed to contaminants in their air, water, and land, their homes flooded by land erosions that they did not cause, losing the ecosystems around them to greed. But these are the communities that are left unheard, as politicians sit in their eco-chambers signing useless policies, that seem helpful at face value, but actually drive no real change. We need more activists and justice-oriented climate change experts in these rooms. Politicians have opportunity to make significant change if they relinquish fear, greed, and ego. My hope is to have policy that not only seems like it is "for the people", but actually goes above and beyond in righting wrongs, in establishing justice within forgotten communities, and providing a good quality of life for those that have been suffering.

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United Nations, COP, and Colonization

Due to its political status as a territory of the United States, Puerto Rico's direct engagement in global conversations, such as the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties (COP), is limited. Puerto Rico’s island categorization falls under a gray area. It is a territory of the United States, specifically a Commonwealth, which makes it neither an independent nation nor a state of the U.S. However, although Puerto Rico does not attend any United Nations conferences as a member state or even observer state, Puerto Rican groups do attend to represent the island and call for a stabilization of its status. The United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization has declared time and again their call and recommendation for Puerto Rico’s independence, starting with their 1972 Colonialism Committee Resolution. This committee approved a resolution recognizing the “inalienable right of the people of Puerto Rico to self‐determination and independence.” Interestingly, The United States and Britain withdrew from the committee in January, 1971. If you look at this map from the United Nations’ Committee on Decolonization’s website, these two stand out as the countries with the most colonies (not to mention that there are so many other territories and nations missing from this map). The drawback of this resolution is that Puerto Rico was not colonized as a colony, which was the United States’ hope; if it would’ve been classified as a colony, there would have been a forum dedicated to pushing demands on independence, which would have made the United States’ occupation more difficult. If considered as a stand-alone country, Puerto Rico would be classified as a SIDS alongside its neighboring Caribbean islands; instead, Puerto Rico is listed under Small Island Developing States Associate Members of the United Nations Regional Commissions alongside thirteen other occupied, colonized, and dependent territories. In a recent instance, Puerto Rico was included under the listing of SIDS, for a 2019 report of the United Nations Division for Sustainable Development Goals and Department of Economic and Social Affairs regarding SIDS partnerships. Puerto Rico was described as a dependent territory SIDS along with other dependent Caribbean islands. Although there is no clear stance on Puerto Rico’s status when it comes to the United Nations, one thing is clear: the United Nations and COP will never reserve a seat at the table for colonized nations and indigenous nations.

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Greenwashing our human landscapes

"Conventional design and engineering can actually greenwash climate risks. We normalize and render "safe" the dynamic corridors of rivers. We fortify waterfronts and literally pave the way for developments atop used-to-be wetlands. These practices normalize the occupation of land not suited for habitation."

Kate Orff, Mending the landscape, featured in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

In this piece of writing, Kate Orff addresses greenwashing in a form that isn't utilized often; where greenwashing is usually employed in the context of big corporations and their misleading sustainability campaigns, Orff speaks to the greenwashing that results from land use and land alteration. Construction, design, and engineering corporations use humans' desire for utopia to create beautified landscapes that are anything but natural. With time, we forget what land the spaces we occupy were built on. Orff uses the example of building over the home of a river, which is one that I resonate with personally. My grandmother's apartment overlooked a river with its own ecosystem, and what I would call a mini-forest. We've watched over a series of years how the land has been cleared out, my grandmother would mourn the birdsong that she was used the hearing, but these birds did not have a home there anymore as the trees were chopped down. The river was then dried artificially and filled up. All this life lost to build a supermarket. This is supposed to be a win for the people, increasing access to food and goods, but it did not feel like a win for my family. My grandmother would tell me about how the Taínos had a better connection in nature then we do now, and that water always finds its way back to its home. We would laugh together every time the construction site flooded, because at least nature was taking some vengeance. The supermarket chain did not want to nurture the people; they wanted profit. They did not care about my grandmother and all her neighbors, who organized petitions and protested to the mayor. Most humans believe that nature can be bought and destroyed as they please, and some build fake natural landscapes back on that same land, forgetting the history of that ecosystem in the first place.

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It's Time for Change: A Climate Zine Looking Towards 2040

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A climate story: peanuts, littering, and contextualization

When you’re ten years old, you know things about the world, but you don’t know how to interpret them correctly or put them in the right context. At this age, my cousin had just moved out to a land far and unknown to me: Tennessee. The life experiences of ten-year-old me were limited to a small island in the Caribbean, that although being a territory of the United States, was and still is a whole other world to the mainland. On this small island, our connection to the natural world is all-inclusive: the treefrogs that sings named themselves with the “co-quí, co-quí”, the ocean waves communicate their next move even with your eyes closed and underwater, and the land screams for help when it is dirtied by humans. I knew what littering was from a very young age, and would practically shoot lasers out of my eyes when I would hear cars zooming past and leaving their unwanted remnants on the street, or worse, on the grass and sand. If I already understood the dangers and horrific nature of the actions of people three times my age, why couldn’t they? In my mind it was simple: littering = bad. But there are some places where littering = good, and that place was at a peanut restaurant in Clarksville, Tennessee. As I walked into the warmth of that southern peanut restaurant on a cold winter day, my mind slowly started processing my surroundings. We were guided to our table, where we were thrown right into the middle of chaos and madness. Mountains and mountains of peanut shells had taken over what was once floors, and I barely had time to understand what was happening before my aunt took her first bite. She crushed the shell of a peanut, laughing hysterically at my face, and threw it to the ground. I tried to warn her that she was littering, but she would not listen. Soon enough, my entire family began to crush shells and throw them to the ground, crush shells and throw them to the ground, over and over and over again. They didn’t understand that the more they littered, the more hurt nature would be, and I had to do something to stop them. I could not watch the littering unfold any longer. I stood on the table, pointed at my aunt, and screamed at the top of my lungs: “LITTERER! LITTERER”. The manager came over to tame my fury, but little did he know I was prepared to refute every one of his claims, with my unwavering determination and sense of justice to save the Earth. My actions that day in Tennessee did nothing to change the peanut restaurant, as it still encourages its customers to crush peanuts and little to this day. Moreso, the story of the little girl who gave the manager a lesson on littering is still told at every employee training. There is a picture of me screaming, hung up somewhere in Tennessee, and I am proud to say that (although originally misguided), that ten-year-old part of me that screams for justice is still alive within me.

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Creating alternate climate realities: big ideas come from small towns

“So many of us come together to mobilize, make waves, and share space- to feel some agency within a machine that has cogs in nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Everyone looks to one another hoping for the right answer (and also hoping to make that answer first), aiming to deduce the best tactic, the elusive “silver bullet” to stop or at least slow down the crisis that fills us with anxiety. Underlying much of our movement is a fundamental survival mechanism that operates on “me” instead of “we”.

Far too much of our collective energy is directed toward a pursuit that leaves us mirroring capitalism, individualism, and that which we fight. Bringing in more people (and ultimately more dollars) seems to be the only acceptable theory of change. Money-the currency of individualism-hangs like a heavy cloud over campaigns calling for systemic change. It is undeniable we are all stuck in the clutches of capitalism and the fossil fuel economy, from the tiny collective to the global environmental NGO. Creating educational materials, conducting research, bringing lawsuits, etc.- it costs money. But there are millions of people who are waiting for direction on how to protect our shared home. These times are indeed urgent, as all of our messaging states. We can do far better to direct the energy of those already engaged into substantive change.”

Excerpt from Tara Houska’s essay, Sacred Resistance, in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. 

This excerpt tells the reader very clearly: community scale action must be prioritized. It is easy to get caught up in daily life, while trying to at least contribute your little grain of sand (“tu granito de arena”) to the sea of possible actions for mitigating the climate crisis, but that is exactly what our current system hopes for. This system hopes that the most we can do is to stop eating meat, stop single-use plastic, and buy from thrift stores. At the scale of the fossil fuel industry, this is less than significant, but let me be clear: this is not to say that people should take small-scale action, but that these individualized actions leave people satisfied, and so they don’t seek further, larger-scale action. I would love to say that we can change institutions from the inside, but if this is possible, this change will be slow. What we can do now is rely on each other and take these actions into our own hands. In cases when the local government clearly will not take action, I would like to see collective action solving these issues, as has occurred already in vulnerable communities across the globe. Casa Pueblo speaks of creating a new reality for Puerto Rican communities, a reality that doesn’t depend on the lack of reaction from the political leaders that the town leans on. A look into the future occurred after Hurricane María, as Casa Pueblo created a bubble of an alternate reality. This reality of solar-powered homes and businesses allowed the town of Adjuntas to have electricity throughout an island-wide blackout. Now, imagine this reality, but instead of within just a bubble, it has spread to the entire island. Small Island States (SIDS) would greatly benefit from the use of the wind, solar, and ocean resources, especially in the midst of climate disaster. These islands are often left without resources, such as electricity, food, and water, but if their natural resources are harnessed before, during, and in the aftermath of a hurricane, for example, the island community immediately doubles and even triples its resilience to these events. This is a reality that we’ve seen sampled, in smaller bite-sized realities, and it is time to expand beyond the current infrastructure. The people have the power to enact this change, but it won’t be easy.

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From academia to practice in the classroom

Getting real world experience as class assignments? That's as real as academia can get. Not a lot of academic courses offer practice outside of theory. By assigning specific scenarios that are solved the same way they would be done in the "real world" (ie, outside of academia), such as pitching an article to the National Geographic, creating a science-based briefing for a policy maker, or even making decisions as the policy maker themselves, students can understand the differing responsibilities of careers in climate, and apply their climate knowledge to various fields. We as climate activists, scholars, students, scientists, and stakeholders don't need to limit ourselves to one dimension of climate work; we can cross disciplines, apply ourselves multifacetedly, and build on our intersectional and integrative understanding of the systems that continue driving climate change.

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Climate stories: what about a tragic photograph?

The faces of people in newspapers sometimes disturb me. Let me explain. I have talked to people that want their stories told or don’t really care whether their likeness is available to the world, but I also know from my own experience that I do not want my family's fresh wounds aired out for the world to see. When we use people’s faces to humanize a climate disaster, at what point are we dehumanizing those whose stories are being told? As a family stands on the rubble of their life-long home, destroyed by a hurricane, flood, tornado, fire, you get to look into their eyes from the other side of your screen and scroll through. I don’t have an answer for this. Climate stories need to be told, but why? For readers to understand the impacts of climate change, as climate disasters worsen all over the world but especially for vulnerable populations. For outside observers of these disasters to understand their role, and the role of the powerful and wealthy, in exacerbating climate change. Maybe these stories and these faces can reach someone out there that can make a statistically significant difference in the effects of our human actions. These stories are told to a curious or bored or skeptical audience, and then what? What am I or you or anyone reading going to do about it? Why is their pain and suffering available to me, why is it for sale and on exhibit? Whose pockets do the profits from the exposure of this suffering reach?

Let people tell their own stories. Most importantly, listen to those communities that have already been facing the impacts of climate change before it’s too late. Listen to them before disaster occurs, so communities can have more resources available earlier on as they search for and work towards solutions. 

Heather McTeer Toney speaks specifically to the experiences of black women in the South (the southern USA), highlighting how community efforts and ancestral knowledge have been a powerful tool for collective action, and how these efforts are starting to overcome the tokenized use of black voices in climate tragedy media.

An excerpt from McTeer Toney’s exposé Collards Are Just as Good as Kale featured in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis below expands, touches on, and adds dimension to the key points discussed above:

“Despite hearing the Republican rhetoric of “climate change ain’t real,” people knew that something more than a rising river was changing and amiss. The river waters were coming faster and stronger from the increased snow up north. (Heavier wintertime precipitation is yet another outcome of rising global temperatures.) Each time Chicago, Minneapolis, and other midwestern cities got strong winter storms, the snow melted into streams that eventually made their way to the Mississippi Delta. Deer and duck seasons weren’t the same as in years past. Cotton and soybean crop yields were different. Increased heat, droughts, and floods meant more pests. Meanwhile, it felt like no one was listening to the voices of the poor, of rural folks, of southerners. 

[...]We live in pollution, play around it, work for it, and pray against it. Hell, we even sing about it. Black women are everyday environmentalists; we are climate leaders. We just don’t get the headlines too often. Rarely do we see or hear Black voices as part of national conversation about climate policy, the green economy, or clean energy - even though 57 percent of Black Americans are concerned or alarmed about climate change, compared to 49 percent of White folks. We’re relegated to providing an official comment on environmental justice issues like the water crisis in Flint, or we’re the faces in the photos when candidates need to show they’re inclusive. Fortunately, this is slowly changing as more and more women of color step loudly up to the table and make their expertise known in climate justice and culturally competent, solution-based thinking.”

What are your thoughts? Let's continue the conversation.

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Understanding the Job Market when it comes to a career in Climate Change: Climatologist vs Policy Analyst

Career: Climatologist (Climate Scientist)

Median Pay: $94,570

Number of jobs 2020: 10,700

Employment growth: 8% increase

In simple terms, climatologists are scientists who study climate change. By understanding long-term trends in climate variability as well as climate effects on the atmosphere and biosphere, climatologists can inform both the scientific community and the general public on the latest climate-related insights that can inform future decisions. 

There are a different ways to be a climate researcher, such as:

Field Study Researcher (focused on taking measurements of regional impacts)

Global Scale Researcher (multiple and cross-country collaborations)

Computer Model programmer (working directly with data and programming)

Working for:

State and Federal Governments

Non-profit organizations

Consultancies

Universities

Sources: https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/youre-a-what/climatologist.htm

https://www.dnr.sc.gov/education/pdf/Climatologist.pdf

Career: Climate Policy Researcher/Analyst

Median Pay: $76,480 per year

Number of jobs 2021: 80,000

Employment growth: 4-7% increase

Climate Policy Analysts research through the data and information that is published by climatologists and make recommendations for environmental policy based on their findings. By analyzing a variety of climate issues and solutions as part of the policy-making decision process, Climate Policy Analysts develop research and policy to reach and advance climate mitigation and adaptation goals. 

There are different ways to be a policy analyst, such as:

Federal Policy Researcher

State Policy Researcher

Local Policy Researcher

Working for:

Municipal, State, and Federal Governments

Non-profit organizations

Consultancies

Natural Resource Management

Private Company sustainability, climate or resilience office

Land Use Planning 

Sources: https://www.usgbc.org/professionals/green-careers/climate-change-policy-analyst

https://www.iop.org/careers-physics/your-future-with-physics/career-paths/policy-adviser

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A message of Hope? captured on 35 mm film.

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Science and activism can and should rely on each other

I identify as both a scientist and an activist. The creation of The Climate Conversations  stems from a gap in the climate world, in which key scientific discussions never really leave the academy, and in turn the climate science space is not made accessible to activists. In sharing news, scientific breakthroughs (the good and the bad), adaptation and mitigation successes, and general climate knowledge, this community page strives to facilitate and support the conversation between scientists, activists, and anyone else who has an interest in our changing climate. Activists should utilize the climate data available in order to further their work; science can provide an even stronger foundation for justifying the climate fight and for combating misinformation. In order for this to occur, science should be made easily available to those outside the scientific community. Scientists should also listen to and keep up with activists as they develop their research, implement their methodologies, and share their results; without considering the social justice aspects and implications of their work, the data can only go so far in aiding communities impacted by climate change. As building solidarity between various social justice movements is a recognizable way to make them stronger, creating an interdisciplinary connection that transcends categorization (ie, within or outside academia) can also serve to mend theory with practice, bringing scientific studies into the realm of real life.  An additional nuance that is important to take into account is the difference between the uses of Western science and traditional knowledge. The scientific method follows Western ideals, and Indigenous knowledge ends up forgotten and ignored. Western science can take a page from climate activist’s books by acknowledging and uplifting these traditional beliefs, wisdom, and ideas. Incorporating Indigenous perspectives when engaging with science and activism can provide richer and more nuanced outcomes and insights for the benefit of our planet, our environment, and our communities.

To close up these thoughts is an excerpt from Sherri Mitchell - Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset’s essay Indigenous Prophecy and Mother Earth featured in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis:

“Ironically, the Indigenous ways of knowing and being that European colonists saw as primitive and uncivilized are now being actively sought out to save our environment and humankind from the brink of extinction. Indigenous knowledge is based on millennia-long study of the complex relationships that exist among all systems within creation. It encompasses a broad array of scientific disciplines: ethnobotany, climatology, ecology, biology, archaeology, psychology, sociology, ethnomathematics, and religion. [...] Unfortunately, a great deal of critical Indigenous knowledge has remained outside the carefully ordered categorization of Western thought, making its holistic concepts difficult to comprehend for those who have been trained to see the world in fractured pieces. It is this fractured view that has been central to the fracturing of our societies and environment.”

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A working definition for Integrative Human-Environmental Research

Integrative Human-Environmental Research:

Incorporates socially equitable participation and strives for co-production of knowledge through methods of observation and analysis centering social-ecological systems and human-Earth dynamics. These methods seek to improve the relationship between societies and their environments, with an understanding of the large-scale impacts of industrialized human activity in the Anthropocene which have transformed the natural and climate landscape, investigating how, in turn, the consequences of these transformations return to the global human system.