A Framework For Thinking With

architectures of Planetary Well-Being

By Alice Yuan Zhang

Cyclical Time as Antidote 

Judnick Mayard on 'Lay Me Down in Praise'

With Mpho Matsipa

Imaginative Ruptures

Welcome to architectures of planetary wellbeing, a podcast and audio sense-making space that explores the interconnection of our social and ecological systems. Each season, we partner with climate visionaries in shaping a series of conversations that bring together a variety of lived experiences with the hopes of helping us explore the threads between architecture, design, and environmental activism. For our first season, we are honored to have Yessenia Funes, New York-based environmental journalist and the Climate Director at Atmos Magazine, as our host.

architectures of planetary well-being with Yessenia Funes

Audio:
Welcome to Architectures of Planetary Well-being, a podcast and audio sense-making space that explores the interconnection of our social and ecological systems. Each season, we partner with climate visionaries to join us in hosting and shaping a series of conversations that bring together a variety of lived experiences, with the hopes of helping us explore the threads between architecture, design, and environmental activism.

For our first season, we are honored to have Yessenia Funes as our host. Yessenia Funes is an environmental journalist based in New York. She's currently the Climate Director for Atmos, an independent nonprofit magazine that covers climate and culture where she publishes The Frontline. She has written for publications like Vogue, The Guardian and i-D magazine. Beyond her work, she's queer, she's Latina, and she's the children of Salvadoran immigrants. She focuses on reporting and writing on climate justice, always working to build a better world through her words.

Alice Grandoit-Šutka:
Welcome, Yessenia. We're so happy to have you as a host for our first season of the Architectures of Planetary Well-being podcast. To kick off the season, we thought it would be great to give listeners a moment to acquaint themselves with you, as you are the first person to take us on this exploratory journey. So I thought this kind of episode could serve as a way for us to get to know you and maybe learn a little bit more about who you are, and also what you've learned or what you've taken away from this time in this journey with us.

So, to kick things off, I was just kind of curious to learn a little bit more about you. When did you first realize that you wanted to become a writer, and most specifically, focused on environmental and climate justice storytelling?

Yessenia Funes:
Yeah, this is a bit of a long story, so I'm going to try to condense it. But I think it starts from the very beginning with me. I grew up to two parents who were immigrants; they're from El Salvador, and we grew up pretty poor. Eventually I just had my mom, a single mom in the picture, and there's a lot of gang violence growing up. My family's survivors of gun violence; teen pregnancy was quite normal growing up—there are all these different factors that sort of instilled in me this sense of injustice. I remember growing up thinking, "This doesn't feel right." And then I remember going to El Salvador with my mom and my dad and seeing what the sort of extreme end of that spectrum is, right? Kids running around without shoes, sewage being dumped into rivers. And I remember thinking, "This doesn't feel right either."

And I remember it dawned on me at some point in high school, there are people who have it well and have privilege and have it easy. I didn't quite have a racial analysis lens yet at the time, or a class analysis lens, but I understood that some people have it easy and some people don't. And that instilled in me this very real sense of wanting to do something about it—of justice, you may say. And yeah, writing was just kind of the one thing that I felt I was good at in school. I was never fond of science, never was fond of math. And so I was like, "Shit, I should just become a writer, because English class is the one class that I can do with my eyes closed.”

I don't think I really understood what journalism was until I actually got to J-School. But it became quite clear to me once I got to J-School that climate change was going to be my focus, or rather environmental issues. I can't remember if it was my freshman or my sophomore year that Superstorm Sandy hit New York. And that was the first time that I saw the words “climate justice,” and the first time that I felt scared about what could happen with rising global temperatures, rising sea levels. My mom lost power for about two weeks when Superstorm Sandy hit down on Long Island, and I was in Upstate New York. Plattsburgh is where I went to school, and I was totally shielded from that. But the fear and the concern were real.

And people were suffering after that, and it just made things, I think, feel much more visceral than they had before then. And so I quickly pivoted, picked up an Environmental Studies major and was quite focused. I didn't take high school that seriously, but when I got to college, I was not messing around. I was really, really serious about my studies and really determined to figure out a way to get a job doing this work. Luckily, it all worked out. But yeah, I think that it was really, for me, it was my upbringing, the environment in which I was raised, the home in which I was raised—and then ultimately Superstorm Sandy just kind of shed this light on how all these things were connected for me.

And climate change, environmental issues, they just felt like a really easy way to cover and write about all these problems that I have issue with, through this lens of how much worse it's going to get in a warming world. Yeah, so I guess that's how I got here. And it's actually taken me a little while to figure that out because I've been asked this question a few times, and when I first got asked this question, I was like, "Huh, I'm not sure." And upon reflection, it's all become much more clear now to me.

AGS:
Yessenia, I am thankful that you shared kind of where this has all started or where it all started for you. And just thinking about a lot of the things that you work on, both with Atmos and some kind of organizing projects, I'm very curious, kind of, what values kind of keep you grounded in this type of work?

YF:
Yeah. I feel like I could list words all day, but there are three that really came to mind immediately. That's “truth,” “compassion,” and “understanding.” First and foremost, I'm a journalist, and for journalists, truth is our whole reason of being, right? Uncovering the truth, deciphering the truth, telling the multiple truths that can exist at a time. But also, I think for a long time, journalism has lacked compassion, especially toward communities like mine, whether that's immigrant communities, whether that's Latina communities, but also that of my peers: Black, Indigenous, other people of color, low-income folks.

And so it's really important to me that in telling the truth and in writing the stories that uncover truths, that I'm doing so in a compassionate way that humanizes people, that gives them a voice, that centers their lived experience versus what the government or what their oppressors would say. And then really understanding, because I think that at the end of the day, what I'm hoping that I'm able to accomplish by doing this, by telling these truths through a lens of compassion, is that I'm creating a sense of understanding from others, right?

In a lot of the interviews that we've done in this season, it's become clear to me that part of why there is such division and tension and hate that exists right now—white supremacy—comes down to a lack of understanding, I think, between different groups, right? I think that if we can understand one another a little better by telling each other's truths through this compassionate approach, then maybe we can finally learn to see each other as equals and as individuals and as peers, as kin. And so those are the three that came to mind. I mean, there's so many other terms like “justice” and “equity” that I could also rant about. But I think for me, those are the three that really guide my work in storytelling.

AGS:
Thanks for that. I also feel like they’re three that can kind of—they're both kind of personal. I totally can relate to “equity” and “justice,” but I think sometimes just in the day-to-day, the things that you can kind of constantly return to, maybe even the things that you feel like you have control over—those three sound really beautiful.

YF:
Thanks. Yeah. I feel like also “justice” and “equity” is, everyone, it just feels overdone at this point. And part of me is like, what are the three that are different, that maybe we don't hear said over and over again?

AGS:
Exactly. I can relate. I have a question for you. I'm kind of curious now that we're kind of in this visionary state, and I feel like this kind of time together this season has allowed us to take some step back—some steps back—or some time away to kind of envision something different. What do you envision for the future of our planet's well-being?

YF:
Oh man. I actually wrote this story for Patagonia a couple years ago. It's called “A Letter to 2030”—“A Letter from 2030,” rather. And essentially, it's me writing where I'm in the year 2030 and describing what I'm seeing to… I write the letter to one of my best friends, and really wrote it thinking a lot about her son, who was just recently born at the time. He's mixed race, but he's Black, and thinking about the world that he was being born into and how I want the world to change, both for his sake but also for the sake of all the other children. And I think a lot about my own children who do not yet exist, who I would love to exist in the near future.

And so I think the most simple way of describing this is: what I want to see for the future is a world where the skin color of my children doesn't predetermine what opportunities they have, their health outcomes, how safe they'll be. And what that looks like is a world where the air is cleaner, right? Where our politicians aren't being puppeteered by the fossil fuel industry. A world where we invest in renewable energy and push that technology forward. A world where land has returned to Indigenous people, where Black and Brown folks aren't incarcerated at disproportionate rates. And I used to not really connect these specific sort of ideas and hopes to architecture, but after this season and after the interviews we've done and the conversations we've had, it's become clear to me that all of this is directly linked to architecture, which has been really fascinating for me to sort of explore.

AGS:
On the topic of architecture—and thanks for sharing—this season when we approached you, I'm sure there was a little bit of hesitance around why we would ask you to be a part of a quote-unquote "architectures" conversation. And as you know, with re:arc, a lot of what we're trying to do is kind of open up how people perceive and understand the practices of architecture and design. Thus, you'll see us constantly talking about these architectures with an “S,” and design, and also the built environment. How have your understandings of these concepts kind of changed and shifted throughout the season?

YF:
Look, before I met you, Alice, before I was introduced to re:arc, I had this very specific sort of idea of what architectures are, and is. I sort of just imagine a white dude with circular glasses, his blueprints, designing the world's next gorgeous building or theater or something. I either imagined this really futuristic hipster-type person or really old-school European art, the European art that's woven into so much of its buildings that get... It was very much associated with buildings and whiteness.

Now, it's really fascinating to me because I realize that architecture is not just about the buildings we live in and the buildings that we see. It's not just about skyscrapers and European architecture. It's also about what the land was before buildings, right? The decisions that went into deciding why things are placed where they were and who was consulted or who was not consulted, who was removed from these lands that these buildings can exist in the first place, what ecosystems were destroyed in order to have this infrastructure.

But also, it's so clear to me now that architecture is, it's just like, it's beyond, right, the actual built environment and our landscape. It's also about designing and envisioning and dreaming about the future we want to see, which is just such—it's such an integral part of what my work is as a storyteller, is imagining and envisioning and dreaming about what we want to see and finding the voices of the people who are working to make that happen.

And so now, people that I never really thought of as architects, I look at them and I'm like, "I think you are an architect of your specific field," or, "You're building something for us and for the world, and you're leaving a legacy behind, that it might not be a tangible building made with concrete and glass, but you're building something even more valuable than that." Which—maybe community, or maybe it's art, maybe it's education, right? And so, yeah, I think I have a newfound appreciation for architecture, and I'm just so fascinated to continue learning more about this. I definitely think this is the beginning of my foray into design and architecture, not the end of it.

AGS:
Happy to hear that. And as you know, we also see you and the work that you do as a type of architecture. So it was really wonderful and affirming to hear you say that you also see, kind of, storytelling as a form of architecture. Throughout the season, we see a plurality of architectures in each episode, actually, and we kind of just talked a little bit about what it personally means to you. But just kind of curious if there's any highlights or moments from this season that really have kind of resonated with you to actually help you arrive at this kind of deeper understanding

YF:
Yeah. I mean, our first episode, our interview with Tamara Toles O'Laughlin, 100%. I think that conversation really transformed my understanding of architectures, and I think that our listeners will walk away from that conversation having a newfound appreciation as well. So definitely encourage y'all, stay tuned for the first episode. I think also, our conversations with Nathalie and Cruz, WAI Architecture. I'm sorry, I might be misnaming their organization. Is it WAI Think Tank?

YF:
WAI Think Tank. Sorry, Cruz. Sorry, Nathalie. Their conversation on decolonization and the histories of architecture, and the ideas of maybe architecture isn't about building, maybe it's about tearing things down. There's just so much unapologetic truths that were shared in that episode that were just really powerful to hear about. And these are things that Cruz and Nathalie talk about all the time, and so it was really cool to be able to capture some of that and record some of that.

Yeah, I mean, there's so much that I think we have in the season, but what was made really clear to me about architectures that I think is going to be the same takeaway y'all have, or that the listeners have, is that it is more than structures, right? This is about power. It's about who is given space, who is given safety, who is left abandoned. And I think that all of our conversations do a really, really beautiful job of shedding light on these truths while also shedding light on how we can transform and improve the field of architecture so that we don't keep perpetuating the harms that it's perpetuated in the past.

So there's a lot of calling out of the awful, but also a lot of solution-building and dreaming, which is always really necessary. Especially now as the urgency around the climate crisis builds and the urgency around white supremacy builds, it feels important that we're also trying to figure out, how do we fix this?

AGS:
Yessenia, thank you so much for joining us on this journey this season. We're so excited to share with our listeners everything that we've learned alongside you, and we will be giving listeners every episode an opportunity to follow you and more about your work, and we look forward to being in touch with you soon.

YF:
Thank you, Alice. This has been a real pleasure of mine. So thank you for inviting me on this journey with you.

Audio:
Architectures of Planetary Well-being is a podcast of Revisions, a media initiative supported by re:arc Institute, a philanthropic organization committed to supporting architectures of planetary well-being. For more information on re:arc, please visit www.rearc.institute. This season is hosted by Yessenia Funes. For more information on her work, you can follow her online at @yessfun, Y-E-S-S-F-U-N, and in her work, The Frontline at Atmos magazine. This podcast is produced by Minah Kwon and Andi Kristins. Music by In Atlas.

The Architectures of Planetary Well-being podcast Season 1 is hosted by Yessenia Funes and produced by re:arc institute. In this episode, host Yessenia Funes dives into Sustainable Movement Building with environmentalist Tamara Toles O’Laughlin. Tamara Toles O’Laughlin is a New York-based environmentalist, lawyer, and organizer, with over 20 years of experience focused on equity, access, and community. She is the founder of Climate Critical Earth and president/CEO of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. Join us as we explore Sustainable Movement Building, discuss design in our built and social environments, and uncover the importance of forming spaces for rest, community care, and creative practice, in our very first episode.

Sustainable Movement Building with Tamara Toles O’Laughlin

Yessenia Funes:
Hello. To kick off our first episode of the season, we're talking to Tamara Toles O'Laughlin. She's an environmentalist with over 20 years of experience focused on equity and community. She was previously the North American Director for 350, an international climate organization. She might not design buildings or cities, but she's a different sort of architect. She's building a new culture within the climate justice movement, one of care and repair, to ensure leaders have the energy they need to keep doing the work.

I wanted to kick off the season with Tamara's voice because this work is essential, urgent, and needed. In order to succeed in taking down the bad guys fueling the climate crisis, bad guys like the fossil fuel industry, we need advocates who are healthy and who feel supported by their community. Instead, there's a lot of burnout and trauma, especially among women of color. If we're going to transition into more sustainable societies, that means building sustainability into the activism, too.

This is the Architectures of Planetary Well-being Podcast. I'm your host, Yessenia Funes.

Hello, everyone. We are here today with Tamara Toles O'Laughlin. She is an environmentalist with over 20 years of experience working on equity, access, and community. Some of you all may know her work previously as the North American Director for 350, an international climate organization. Right now, Tamara's focused on building a culture of care and repair within the climate community to ensure that leaders in the movement have the energy they need to keep doing the work. She herself does a range of work, from developing climate policy to protecting communities from pollution, and she's here with us today to get into all that and talk about sustainable movement-building.

Tamara Toles O'Laughlin:
Hey, how are you doing? Glad to be here.

YF:
Glad to have you with us. As you know, this podcast is sort of an exploration of architecture, design, climate, and the urgency around the intersection of all these themes. I wanted to firstly just ask, what do you think of architects? How do you think of this field?

TTO:
So last year I was interviewed by University of Pennsylvania Architecture Department, because they were trying to develop some shared language around equity in the building space. And so I've seen this question appearing since like 15, 20 years ago—when LEED certification was one entry point for folks trying to figure out how to fit into the work, when passive house design was moving in and out of the way people think about dealing with climate. Because for many decades, folks have been working on earth houses and earth ships, where people leverage the land as it is to build a home that is sustainable in the long term and can withstand a lot of things.

So, I feel like the work of environmental advocacy, the work of social justice—all of which has become the modern day climate and environmental movement—has always had a built environment component to it. It's just the soulsole part is what we're catching up on. So folks are starting to recognize that through millennia of Indigenous practices, we've always been building things. We've always been engineers and architects of the work. The question is whether or not that has a political lens to it and, increasingly, environment and climate are political. So we're seeing it there. And I think that the world of architecture is about how we design the future we’re going to live in, quite literally, and that will require us to have an equitable lens on the environment if we want the most people to experience it. So I do think there's some very natural complements between the discipline of architecture and the design elements of climate survival.

YF:
I'm curious, given the thinking that you've done on this space, would you consider yourself an architect?

TTO:
So, my training and my background is in environmental law and policy, which includes energy generation and transmission. So I have two degrees. One is a terminal degree in environmental law policy and the other’s a master's degree in environmental law policy that's focused on energy generation and transmission. And so I would say that as a person whose training is that of social engineering, I have to know that that's what I'm doing. Because to build policy to help the development of legislation, to make sure that the law works so that it's power with, not power over, you have to be a social engineer in order to show up for that work responsibly.

YF:
There's this quote that was shared with me that I want to share here with our listeners as well, and it says, “Architecture sits at the interconnection of bodies and environments. It shapes and creates environments for human bodies to find themselves in and care for in on an everyday level.” I personally haven't thought too much about architecture before diving into this work, and I think that some of your framing, it just feels really relevant and it's encouraging to hear that other folks in the space are already thinking of these connections and drawing these lines between their work and the world of architecture because it feels like a really urgent space to begin bringing climate advocacy into.

TTO:
And I'll just say that I think for folks who have been tracking the 50, 60, 70, 150 years of environmental work and the different parts of it—environmental justice, climate justice—where they meet largely has to do with time and how much we're careening towards a climate crisis that becomes… makes the world likely to be more or less habitable. And so I think architecture design and how people live is a huge part of the conversation on the climate justice part of the work, largely because when incidents like Katrina happened or failures of infrastructure happen, like Jackson, Mississippi, or determinations of politics happen, where we literally reroute clean water from communities to route it to businesses—these are all design choices. We're designing a system. And so I do think that as environmental justice blends with the work of climate justice, we move from talking just about what happens to people and how they're designed out of choice, to how people are designed into choice and climate justice.

YF:
That point, “designed into choice,” feels like an important one. I was hoping, Tamara, to hear a little bit about your own journey. I'm not sure how many of our listeners have followed your work over the years. We might have some listeners who are learning about you for the first time and learning about the work that you're doing in this space. I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey and your own background as an environmental expert advocate attorney, and the experiences and background that brought you to this point of understanding. I imagine that you didn't always have this clear lens on the intersection of all these issues, so I would love to hear a little bit about how you got here.

TTO:
So my mom worked for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. And so as a part of her work in the early ’90s, late ’90s, she spent a lot of time learning about what we now have up and running as our wastewater infrastructure throughout the state of New York, which involves a bunch of different municipalities, territories, folks with different jurisdiction—but also is about giant bodies of water that have to be protected by an environmental police force that populate the places where these reservoirs and bodies of water are kept safe so that people can drink it all over the place.

When I was a little kid, I understood that to mean that my mom was a water protector and that she would take me on a tour to the Croton Reservoir or further up the Hudson or to see the four or five different massive reservoirs, massive by New York standards. We’re not talking about the Great Lakes, which are a whole ’nother conversation. But that work of making sure the water could be safe, so people who live hundreds of miles of pipeline away—moving that water from one part of New York to another part—gave me a sense that there was a network of things happening or conspiring in favor of folks who have access to clean water. It didn't just happen by accident.

She was there when they started to bill for it. She was there when they started to figure out how they might charge for something that is free to everybody. And so watching her evolve as the city developed the lens on how to both preserve water and protect it, is a part of why I thought about it. As a kid who lived in Brooklyn and the city, my interfaces with the natural world came from Prospect Park, which I grew up very near to. It was my everyday park. So I had this backyard that I shared with thousands of other people every day. And so all of those are design elements. I grew up in the time of Greenstreets, which means somebody else, before I was born, made an argument that people needed to have access to parks. And so despite the fact that there's real controversy in how those parks got built and on whose land they were built and over whose rights and bodies they were built, it also meant that the design elements of the place that I live had urban and intentionally not-urban components to it.

And so all of that is very much along the lens of social architecture and design: whether you have access to drinking water, all the pipes that it takes to run from a reservoir in Upstate through your local interchange to the buildings and pipelines inside your building, in your walls, in your house, in your bathroom. I was a kid who had the pleasure of knowing that when you turn your water on the tap, you're actually getting this water that comes from this other place. My mom took me to it. You could fit a car in there. There was a car in there. You could fit an animal in there. And so I was a kid at the playground who was giving people way too much information that they didn't necessarily want when I was a kid. And because of the rules, you can go to the clean side of Prospect Park, which is a thing that every parent that lived within Prospect Park would tell you. Where's the clean part? Oh, you'll know when you reach the part you're not supposed to be at.

But all of these things, as I became an adult, it was really clear to me that other folks in a policy realm that I wasn't yet involved in fought over where trees would be placed, how many people would have access to green space, whether or not the money that came from the census meant that there had to be a patch of grass and a park within X amount of feet of every place where there are kids that are playing, or how close schools are.

And so I think when we start to look at it, our very life experiences are shaped by it. When I went to Vermont Law School, Pat Parenteau, who is a recently retired professor from that school, dubbed me an “urban environmentalist,” and I was confused. I was like, “what does that mean? This seems insulting. What do you mean, ‘urban environmentalist’?” He was like, “Because you came to this work in a way that's not very normal.” And I thought, interesting. But he wasn't completely out of touch with the way he would define how I came to this work, because it just so happened that I noticed the ways that my mom's work helped to deliver water to folks who didn't necessarily think about how it got to them—or the idea that I would notice the policy program that would give everybody access to Greenstreets so that folks could have experiences like mine, where they spend most of their childhood inside of a park or in grass or on the water because it was the public's playground.

And so when I rolled up to Vermont Law School, one of my classmates was drying out an animal that he had killed on the roof of his car. This was the first day of law school, of our classes. And I was like, “there's a dead animal on top of your car.” He’s like, “yeah, I'm drying it out. It's going to be there all winter. You want to come over to my house for dinner?” And I was totally freaked out. And then he and I went into the same Constitutional Law class and I was like, “so you're going to eat that?” And he’s like, “yeah, why do you think I'm an environmentalist? If he doesn't have good food to eat, I don't have good food to eat.” And at that exact moment I realized what Pat Parenteau meant, which is that each of us came to the Law School to do something different, to protect a place that we love, which isn't really very different at all. So his calling me an “urban environmentalist” was suggesting that my view of what is the environment is different than another view. I have some questions about normalizing which of those makes more sense, since we did build the city out of the country everywhere we've ever done that. But it was an important point that that guy who was drying an animal on the top of his car, waiting for it to get to his house, has just as much interest in whether or not there is clean water and clean air as I do. We're just trying to protect different people.

YF:
And since then, you've done even more urgent and necessary community-based work. I think your latest project, Climate Critical Earth, is a really powerful manifestation of what you've built in the decades since then. I want to hear you just share a little bit more about what Climate Critical Earth is, and share with our listeners here about this new project you launched. Because I do think that what you're creating with this space is something that we're going to need a lot more of, not only in the climate movement, but across social justice movements. So yeah, break it down for us what you're doing with Climate Critical Earth.

TTO:
Thank you so much for asking. I think as a person who has a reputation for doing things that maybe aren't common and then continuing to do it, Climate Critical Earth is really a powerful intervention. As a person who's been in this work for almost all of my adult life, some 25 years since I became an adult, I have managed to organize campaigns and build demands and help people build policies that speak to the work. And as someone who has happened to do a lot of my work while , I was the executive director of the Maryland Environmental Health Network, which had a statewide coalition called Community of Communities, which is one of my favorite organizing bodies of all time—including 350, because that particular branch of the movement was about going door-to-door across the state to help people think about how climate was impacting them.

And that group developed a multigenerational practice of folks who were throwing down on behalf of their local and global concern around environment. And what I mean by that is that there were folks—some of the most seasoned activists, the eldest folks—were the ones who were rowdy. “We're ripping off our clothes and protesting outside the governor's house.” And I would say, “well, I think we should just circulate a petition first and see if they know what we’re…” But they were always the ones who were excited. They were like, “I have grandkids who need a quality of life that I never had.” And so moving from being someone who was focused on the environmental health impacts and what that means to people gave me access to the social determinants of health as a framework—the idea that people don't just land where they are, they designed into it. And so in some ways, the social determinants of health are like a blueprint or a coda that really easily connects to the functions of society that we think are natural because we're born into them, but are actually designed by people who came before us—and frankly places where we need to ask questions.

So moving into my work at 350, so much of that was focused on mobilizing as a tactic to revoke the social license of people who, just because we were born with them running things, doesn't mean we need to continue doing that. In my role as the CEO and president of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, I spent a lot of time talking with different kinds of folks who view the movement differently, but to have a real clarity around the idea that the revolution must be resourced. And that was always true, because we can't just go outside with ideals. We need to have access to policy, practice, and programs that allow us to be able to move what we want to see into a future where it happens.

So Climate Critical Earth was born out of 25 years of leading teams of people and connecting the dots on big things and helping them advocate against municipalities, local governments, states and multinational organizations where people are telling you, “you don't have a right to a voice.” And over the course of that time, I realized that the biggest resource we have are the people. So Climate Critical Earth is really an intervention that recognizes that we have no chance of averting climate disaster if we don't take care of the people who fight for the planet. The people themselves are a resource, whether they're practitioners or organizers or activists, they're the ones who make survival possible by connecting with communities and resourcing them and moving money to and through communities.

But what I've seen in every place I've ever been is that, because we don't take care of people, we ask broken folks to help us build the revolution. And I think it's entirely inappropriate for us to do that because then we burn out people who are bright, people who are talented, people who are caring, because so much of this work is so close to our identity that we don't know how to stop. It's pretty irresistible. If you've ever been in a crisis situation, you have seen people do things they don't do every day. It's pretty intoxicating. If you watch someone save a baby from a car and they lift up a car, or you watch someone help a neighbor who's struggling and can't swim to avoid a flood, every day you have the opportunity to see people operate at a higher level than they do because it's literally life or death.

And what Climate Critical Earth really helps people to recognize is that we can't run our lives at that level. If we don't have radical rest, if we don't develop care practices, if we don't build in restorative work for ourselves, we can't demand restorative practice of the status quo. And we have to do that together because the enemy of our progress is trying to solve any of these problems on our own. So Climate Critical Earth has really been thoughtful about developing programs and practices and toolkits for people to be able to take back out into the movement, so that we develop new models of leadership. Leadership can't just be the person in front of the podium. It can't just be the person who's getting arrested. It can't just be the person who is holding a sign. It also has to be that person at rest, having a break, enjoying some time, eating good food, smiling, laughing with other people—and not just gallows humor that is born of exhaustion.

And so really in my last couple of roles, as I've become more senior in the work, it's clear to me that if we don't make an intention to invest in people, we lose folks. And specifically for Black, Indigenous, and all people of color, trans community, and women, basically anyone who we can erase and whose identity is really threatened by the climate crisis—if they're in this work, they're even more vulnerable to the kind of burnout that we're talking about because their actual identity, the way they live, is tied into the work they're trying to do, which means they put endless energy into solving the problem and then burn out when we need them most. I have the fortune of knowing that my role is only one part of an anti-racist practice and a radical care program. Climate Critical Earth is an intervention to try to build up the stores of people who can deliver that, so that we change the model of working. So it isn't “fight until you die.” It's fight, rest, and return.

YF:
Yes. And it feels like such a relevant moment to launch this kind of organization. Self-care and rest became such dominating narratives during the pandemic, and there have been all these stories and headlines about burnout, but I don't know that this discussion has actually translated into action and changes in the workplace. And for many folks, their job is just the job. They go to work every day, they do what they got to do, they go home. But I think what folks on the outside forget about is that for folks doing climate and environmental work, it's not just a job, right?

YF:
It's much deeper than that. Like you said, it is life or death for so many of us doing this work. And so I just wanted to say I appreciate this organization because I'm hoping, and I'm hopeful, that what you're building here will have a ripple effect because we do need folks to be in for the long run, not just go hard until they can't anymore. And with that, Tamara, I would love to just hear some more specifics. How is Climate Critical Earth accomplishing this? I know that there was a retreat that you held earlier this month. I know by the time this episode comes out, you would've had your second retreat, which I'll be joining.

YF:
Would love to just have you break down for folks how you accomplish this work, and hopefully this is a model that others can replicate as well.

TTO:
So we have some principles which really relate to what I was mentioning previously, which is that yes, we are climate warriors; yes, we're environmental advocates. But we are also creative. We are also co-powering, which means we don't do any of this alone and we do it with joy. We are caring, because asking how you are doing and waiting for an answer is a practice. We can't afford to just expect people because their work is good, that their lives are good. And recognizing that our humanity makes us really, really, really essential.

I can say part of why we've had a couple of programs I'm really excited about, which come out of four different spaces. We have a community care and repair space where folks can come and bring themselves to try to begin to develop a practice that is counterintuitive. We tell you, focus on your work, make the magic, measurable things happen, and then build out a report that makes other people want to do it with you. So, building a care and repair space where we form a community where other folks who are doing this says, you have a right to rest, you might be out-of-touch doing it. Let's start to practice some of that at the individual level and as a community of people who will help you to hold up those practices.

And then we have a community core space because sometimes people are... Well, I will say a lot of folks that I have known are trauma-bonded to work. You come. You do something incredible. You build some. You have an amazing campaign or a program with folks, and then you realize the infrastructure for how you deliver it is really depleting you. You don't have enough time off. You don't have as many days. There isn't a sabbatical program that matters. So the average sabbatical program in an environmental organization is about five years, while Black and Brown, Indigenous people and trans folks don't make it to a five-year anniversary in most organizations.

So rethinking whether or not five is an appropriate number for people who are experiencing harm at home and at work and lateral violence in between, that's one of those things that becomes a practice that we focus on in real time. What's the toolkit? Who do you need to talk to? How do you raise that this issue or well-meaning meaning policy just isn't working for your community in the context of your actual work? So in that community core space, we start to connect the dots on how you showing up for yourself allows you to show up better in a way for you to be an advocate with and for communities that you support, so you can figure out: is this a safe space to even do this work?

Well, our third space is our practitioner space for folks who often do individual projects, advising, supporting folks, mentoring, coaching, where they just want to take a cool idea and see what would happen if they work with someone else. So some of our advisors include Mary Annaïse Heglar, Ife Kilimanjaro, Jasmine Sanders from Our Climate, and Lorraine Chiponda from Power Shift Africa. There are folks who are in this space who are often building a thing that solves today's problem and practicing something that they think might solve tomorrow's problem. So the practitioner's space is where you show up and say, “I have an idea, is there anybody else who wants to work on it with me?” And the global advisor space is really a multinational place where that happens. So big ideas, like climate reparations, which have been the subject of COP27 and so many other spaces over the next few years—and I guarantee you the next few years to come—that's the kind of place where you would bring a big project like that, because it involves multiple people thinking about the same problem happening in lots of places, figuring out what the language is.

And so through these three or four offerings, we are really thinking about the whole person who goes back to a whole community. The retreat that you mentioned is a spur in the community care and repair space. So our very first retreat, the theme was, what's your relationship to power? Because in 25 years of doing this work, I have watched incredible leaders have a shorter lifespan in the work than they need because the organization they've gone to, and the people they've worked with, have never seen a thing like what they asked to bring there. And so as a person who spends a lot of time working with people across networks, across the sector, it really is important that—and not just developing the practice—but sending people back to a place where they could do it without harm is really important.

So at the retreats, we start to dig in on what's your relationship to power, because if you don't know what your relationship to power is, and you have triggers related to how you've seen power play out in your life, it becomes very difficult to imagine something new. So this next retreat that we are going to, which will have happened by the time that this episode airs, is really about lateral violence and what happens when your own resume is a series of instances where you have survived lateral violence and the system hasn't quite changed enough to catch up with you. And that came from lots of conversations that have happened in the community with folks who have said that, when they go to an interview after surviving a place that is flawed in all the ways that we've started to talk about, they have to explain why they haven't died yet. And it's triggering to say, “we agreed that this work is racist. We've agreed that this is not a safe space for people in bodies other than those who have been normalized by the decisions we have made about who gets to do environmental work.” And then a person in any of those bodies goes to an interview and says, “here I am.” And the first question they get asked is, “so why have you moved around so much?”

YF:
And you're talking about a job interview, right?

TTO:
Yeah. I'm talking about the experience of being a person who does this work for a living. I've talked to people who are CEOs, people who are trustees, people who are program officers, people who are organizers and activists. And so many of them have stories about what it means to try to explain to people that you buck the system and the system hasn't fallen yet as you try to move about your work. So we're really going to spend some time thinking about: how do we shift not just us, but how do we shift the context we're in so that individual people showing up to do the work we need everybody to do, don't have to do it in a context where they have to prove why it is the system isn't working for them in the individual races.

YF:
And I know a big theme within this work is the sustainability of the movement and the ability of the movement to survive long term because the climate crisis is here for decades, potentially centuries, to come. And addressing it and reversing some of these effects is going to take a tremendous, tremendous... “Tremendous” doesn't even feel like it encapsulates the effort that's going to be required to save folks, right

YF:
What is the ideal outcome that you're hoping for here? What is it that we need to see change concretely within the movement so that we can make it so that we have a leaderful movement—I know that’s a term we like to use—and a movement that isn't losing our Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in leadership positions?

TTO:
Well, I think we at Climate Critical Earth really hold that we are multigenerational, we are multiracial, we are feminists, we are caring, we are co-generative. There's so many things that could describe how we are. We want a workplace that reflects that. And I think concretely things we would like to see—we would like to see organizations that are environmental organizations set aside money, money. Like money, the place where we tell the real stories about what we care about. If you want to know what someone's priorities are, look at their budget. That's true whether we're talking about an individual person or an organization. We would like to see a line item of resources going towards people having this kind of care as a part of their work. So if we're going to build a 60-million-dollar plan to fight coal or oil or gas, what percentage of that is going to make sure that the people who do it have actual rest practice, have refreshers, and have other people who could step into that work so that the multi-year project can continue? We can't just hire two or three really amazing folks as rock stars, expect them to live an infinitely stressful life, and then somehow be okay to get us from point A to point B in the work. So some of it is about making sure that the whole movement reconsiders what it calls “good work,” what it calls “success.”

For other folks, it's macro-level changes. Being able to go back to your job that you love dearly, trauma-bonded or not, and say, “here are some tools to make this a more habitable existence for me and my colleagues. And here's what we want to see happen in our context.” So some of it is offering folks the opportunity to brainstorm about how the individual organization does or doesn't offer this. And to be able to go back with some practices and some tools and some support to make demands for their own humanity.

For others, it's demanding a line item that allows people, that isn't seen as professional development—meaning you need it to go back to your work—you just need it to be a person. And so between making those demands, making sure it's movement-wide and supporting generalized monitoring. So, one of the things that's currently on the street is a survey on burnout in the climate environment and energy and conservation sector, largely because we need to make sure that on a regular basis we're checking to see how people are doing, not based on where they are, but as a movement, recognizing that all of us play different parts in the movement. So this kind of survey is the kind of thing that allows us to overcome the individual having to defend a system that doesn't work for people. So being able to say, “this percentage of people are experiencing burnout, this percentage of people are recovering from it,” allows us to make some space for the demands for more accountability internally, more resources towards this activity, and more actual policies and practices that allow people to design how they work safely in context.

YF:
Accountability feels like such an important point here that I don't think we talk enough about, and the need to hold people in power accountable beyond our elected officials, but also the folks who are building and designing the movement that we all exist within. And so much of what you shared here, Tamara, the changes that you've outlined here, these organizational changes, I'm really curious to hear how you see these organizational changes translate into environmental and infrastructural changes that, as a society, we need—just bringing it back home to the point of this podcast, architecture and design. How do these organizational changes bring us closer to this world that we need to build so urgently for climate justice?

TTO:
So if you think about building principles, regardless of what structure you're building, every one of us learned in school that if you don't have a good foundation, the rest of it is pretty immaterial, because it's not going to last very long.

TTO:
While I'm a part of other interventions like the Green Leadership Trust, which is about affecting what CEOs do in the work, or EGA, where we're trying to affect how whole parts of resourcing happen in the movement, Climate Critical Earth is focused on the foundation. So we recognize that the climate movement itself, environment itself, is in a dysfunctional spiral that shows up in this organization and that organization and the next one, too. But the real problem is not any specific thing happening in an org or individual people. It's that we have a culture of disposability. And we can't just demand sustainability in products and inputs in external policies, in getting targets for cutting emissions, if the people are disposable.

There was a founder who I worked with in a previous part of my work, and I asked, as a person who could make investments in my staff team, we need to bring in some stuff to support folks because I'm seeing a level of burnout. And when I asked the person if we could do it, they said, “why are you so focused on this? We'll just get new people.” And that conversation is what gave birth to Climate Critical Earth, because it dawned on me that what they were actually saying is that disposability culture is our culture. And so Climate Critical Earth says disposability culture got us into the climate crisis. We need a different type of leadership. We need a different type of leader. We need a different type of organizational assessment to get us out of it. We got to expect more from people than just showing up and doing great work. And that means we’ve got to invest in people like we want more of that.

YF:
Right. And this investment in the people is what can then translate into investment in our communities, and these transformational changes that'll actually improve our quality of life, our air quality, just the general quality of our futures.

TTO:
You've got it. Because at the end of the day, if the foundation for how we move people through campaigns, through demands, through massive movement actions, are that we have individuals who are the foundation of the work, who can partner with people to have power with rather than power over, who can create a sense of belonging—they’ve got to know what that actually feels like in order to be a partner to somebody else. There are folks in this work who do this because their community is on the line, who don't do it for any money at all, and at the end of the day, if they get a chance to partner with someone who has the privilege of being an activist or an organizer or a strategist in this work for their living, the two of them getting together with both of them being deeply burnt out—one because they're being ignored by the system, and the other one because they're being continuously extracted from in the work culture—the two of them are not going to come up with the solutions we need to make change.

It goes against everything we've ever done to steward this Earth before now, to expect us to use any single tool of our shared work until it's broken. And the proposition is that the work itself is broken, which means it doesn't partner with communities well, which means it doesn't build the kinds of demands that can make up change, and it doesn't set us up to do our part of it. If we are in a multigenerational work to do the best work we can to steward the Earth, we have to be available for it so that we inspire the next generation to get involved in what is really complicated, difficult, and painful work. If we don't have a practice of healing, of care, of repair, of restoration, then we don't create that example for the other parts of our community that need to also be taken a part of this practice. There are so many strong women, so many strong human beings standing in a gap for their communities. And so many of my colleagues who are buried because they died doing work they love without enough care and support. And when they left, they took institutional information that is going to take us decades to get back. So I would say that Climate Critical Earth is doing something we need now for a future we are depending on.

YF:
I feel like this is a pretty powerful ending, Tamara, to our conversation. And I wanted to ask you to bring forth a quote that you hold dear that helps you sort of maintain the optimism and spirit necessary to move forward, given the difficulty of this work. I wonder if there's a quote that speaks to you during these moments.

TTO:
So there are tons. I would say we're in a leaderful movement, but also a quoteful movement. There's a quote that, funnily enough, it's attributed to a few different people—Montague, Harry Truman, a bunch of other folks—and I'm pretty sure, based on what the quote is, they wouldn't care who gets the credit. The quote is, "It's surprising what you can get done if you don't care who gets the credit."

And so, most people would attribute that to Harry S. Truman, even though plenty of people have said it across time. Because at the end of the day, that's what this work is about, is recognizing that we're all leaderful. We all have capacity and energy to do our part of this long-arc work, like a long arc, hundreds of years of long-arc work. But only if we do it as though who we are doing it with is as important as what we're trying to accomplish. Our name being on it, our brand being on it, is it more important than getting it done?

YF:
And the urgency of this moment definitely requires that we get it done first and foremost.

TTO:
Yeah, and what we're asking for is that people recognize that getting it done means resting is also the work.

YF:
100%. Well, Tamara, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing all this wisdom with us today. It's such a pleasure always talking with you. Can't wait to see you again soon.

TTO:
Thank you so much. Glad for having me.

The Architectures of Planetary Well-being podcast Season 1 is hosted by Yessenia Funes and produced by re:arc institute. In this episode, host Yessenia Funes discusses the process of Decolonizing Architectures with WAI Architecture Think Tank. WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio practicing by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism through a panoramic and critical approach. Founded in Brussels during the financial crisis of 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author and theorist Cruz Garcia and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet, Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one of their several platforms of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade-school Loudreaders. Join us as we relive Cruz and Nathalie's journey in building their studio and practice of which are unrestricted by geographical borders, talk about the frameworks of redefining architectural and historical canons, and go in depth about the preservation and regeneration of alternative and accessible educational formats.

Decolonizing Architecture with WAI Think Tank

Yessenia Funes:
Hi. Today I want to talk about decolonizing architecture. know it may feel like there's a new headline or campaign every other week claiming to decolonize this or that, whether it's decolonizing ecology or decolonizing your diet. I mean, come on. Has decolonization become gentrified? That's a separate topic, but let's keep it real. Colonization lies at the root of why many of our institutions and infrastructures are the way they are. That's especially true with architecture. Conquistadors and settler-colonizers invaded and stole lands to eradicate the people there and build what they believed should exist on those lands instead, right?We're going to get into all that today with our two special guests whom I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting. Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski are a couple who practice and teach architecture together with their studio, WAI Architecture Think Tank. Cruz is Puerto Rican, Nathalie is French, and together their brains can create some pretty radical and inspirational ideas. I absolutely love them and their perspective on design. There's a richness to the world of architecture that you can miss without learning perspectives like theirs. What's the history behind how a place was designed? Is the solution to build more, or is it to dismantle? How does design factor in the people who live and work in a place? How do we learn from cultures?

This is the Architectures of Planetary Well-being podcast. I'm your host, Yessenia Funes.Hello everyone. We are here today with WAI Architecture Think Tank, which is a planetary studio that practices by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism through a panoramic and critical approach. Founded in Brussels during the financial crisis of 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author and theorist, Cruz Garcia, and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet, Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one of their several platforms of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit art space, Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade school, Loudreaders.Nathalie and Cruz, thanks for joining me today.

Cruz Garcia:
Thank you for having us. Super happy to be here.

Nathalie Frankowski:
Thanks a lot for having us.

YF:
I'm super, super excited to dig into all of this with you. We met a few months back in Denmark and I was blown away by the way, by which you all talk about architecture. I'm very new to this realm. It's a theme that our listeners will hear on this podcast, but listening to you two speak when we met in Denmark really gave me a new perspective into what architecture means, into the power that architecture holds. And so I'm really just excited to hear about what drew you both into this world. Could you share a little bit about that history and how you two got involved in architecture?

NF:
Yes, sure. I think for me, it might be something that was also driven by my family. I know that, actually, I think one of the brothers of my grandfather was an architect in Poland, so I was always surrounded by... I think my grandfather initially wanted my father to be an architect, so there was a lot of architecture around me somehow, like books and things like this.But I feel like what really opened the field for me, and was really relevant, was studying in Paris-La Villette. So knowing that, again, there was something coming from family that made me decide to study architecture. When I was studying in La Villette, I was in a department of art, architecture, and philosophy. And suddenly I could bring questions that were much wider than, for example, the design question that was the one that I was more used to.

And I could really combine different interests, different tools—if it was also the tool of movie-making, the tool of writing, the tool of questioning—and understand architecture as something that was much more political. And that would help me a lot to frame questions that I had and hopefully try to find different tools to provoke discussions about things that were really pressing issues that was around us.

CG:
Yeah, for me... Puerto Rico's really strange. It's very, I think, very different to the French context and to Nathalie’s context in the sense that I didn't know what an architect was. I never met any. I didn't know any architect or didn't think of architecture as a profession, although I always wanted to be somebody that designs buildings or spaces.And in Puerto Rico, I thought it was what an engineer is. So I was about to study engineering at the university and I have enrolled at the school and everything. And I remember, last-minute, change of decision to not go to the university that had engineering because we prefer to be in the track team. Me and one of my friends from high school preferred to be in the track team of the university that was close to where we grew up, where I grew up—10 minutes from home, Rio Piedras—and they didn't have engineering. And I remember the director of the athletic department, he was trying to figure out what was there for me, and they told me, “well, there's no engineering here, but there's architecture and if you want we can make you a special program in the first year. You take some other classes and you see that's something that interests you and you apply for the year after because you already passed.” The architecture has its own application deadlines. And I was there in the architecture school for a couple of years, not very interested, to be honest with you. I didn't have much connection to it.And a couple of years later, I started reading some things, particularly political things. I mean, some of them connected back to France with the Situationist... I read this amazing quote that said that urbanism doesn't exist and architecture exists like a commodified product in the market sense of the world, like an ideology. And he compares architecture to Coca-Cola. And I was like, "Whoa, this sounds like something that... There's some anger in this text that is kind of interesting to me and I can identify with it."

And luckily I was also studying literature with some amazing Puerto Rican writers, like Rafael Acevedo and Eduardo Lalo, and I was asking them questions about what's happening in the ’60s and then they were explaining to me. And then I saw this segue from architecture to get there. I mean I love designing and all that, but that's never enough. And I feel like in a way, similar to Nathalie, it was when literature and very important fields of knowledge start clicking; that's when architecture makes sense, in a way.

YF:
Yeah. I love that. Words and writing have been some through-ways for you all to connect more deeply with architecture. I'm curious to hear about the milestones that you all have experienced throughout your practice. Are there any milestones that have informed your architecture practice and values?

NG:
Well, architecture is quite a slow and long profession and I feel, as we were pointing out already in thinking about how we approach architecture, the richness of architecture is the fact that you can define it in many ways. So you can practice it in many different ways and it means, also, that it will shift and it will change, sometimes during your lifetimes. Of course, it depends on how you approach the field and the profession. If it's... Some people will have different types of paths, but I feel, for us, was every time we moved from places to places, I feel that was also a big learning curve.And it shifted a lot in the type of projects we did and maybe of the questions we did; I'm sure Cruz will add on that. But I feel like, for example, the first big move was when we actually moved physically to Beijing, where we practiced for seven years, because that was really a place that forged our thinking, our way of working. The speed of a city was quite amazing.The fact that the city was also going through a lot of changes, that we could really visibly see how people would live there. And that brought a lot of different ways of practicing architecture, of producing different types of projects. After when we moved back, for example to the US, then it was also summer 2020. We were here and again, another shift happened. Cruz was in the street; he can speak more about it. So I feel really being in different places, different contexts, depending on also, of course, of what was unraveling at that time helped us a lot to change and to enrich how we would see and approach our projects.

CG:
And there is something about, as Nathalie mentioned, all those places. We met in Belgium, hated what we were doing, this sort of relationship of architecture and capital. Moved to Amsterdam, had really close encounters with white supremacy. Ended up going to Beijing, running away from Europe in a way.And then discovering—not discovering—discovering ourselves in this place in the middle of modernity, in that really violent, fast, creative process of modernization that Beijing was going through. Then opening a gallery there, publishing a couple of books when we were there. Intelligentsia was really fundamental for starting and developing all these curatorial and publishing platforms that engaged with many different people from many different places. And as Nathalie said, coming back to the US in 2016, also a very critical year if we're talking about white supremacy, and then experiencing 2020 in Pittsburgh, in Virginia—I feel like all of those are really fundamental years to understand.We finished school in 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis. Then we went all the way to Beijing and then back to the US, in the middle of where we are right now. And I feel like this work that has been produced there, in a way, is a reflection of all of those things. And in a way our practice, and ourselves, is also a reflection of having lived in those places. We always tell everybody that we are also a Beijing practice, because many of the ways in which we approach our practice, whatever it is—in architecture and art and writing—has to deal with the fact that we were based in Beijing for seven years.But also I'm Puerto Rican and Nathalie's French, and we are entangled in all these discourses of decolonialism and imperialism, against white supremacy, and how do they manifest in the different places where we go, while also touching all these other interests that our work has and relationships with people. Because I think a lot of what we do has to deal with teaching on one hand, and the other one on developing networks of solidarity through our practice.

YF:
Wow. And so all these networks are being built and established and all these different places where y'all have lived. And I imagine that there's the people, the culture, but also the built environment and all these different pieces of these different places that you two are taking along with yourselves, helping inform your practice and helping guide the direction where y'all hope to take WAI and the direction that y'all hope to take the architecture field at large.

CG:
Yeah, totally. Totally. I feel like we started defining our practice as a planetary studio, in a way, responding to that idea of relationships. But also because many of the questions we're asking are how to deal with questions that are planetary in the scale, in the scope, in the relationship to people. So yeah, it becomes a continuous exercise of redefinition.

YF:
But I'm curious how you all are redefining what it means to be an architect, because I think that the approach that you two have is quite interesting.

NF:
Yeah, I feel like one... So, it's linking a little bit to your previous question, too. I think one of the biggest shifts that happened is that—is actually understanding what architecture could potentially be or how we could potentially practice architecture. Because I feel like, as you mentioned, when you practice there, we are dealing with, in some cases, physical rendering of designs that affect everybody's life, that can be, and that are really, really violent, depending on whom you serve and for whom you are designing, for whom you are building. And I feel, for us, thinking, really, about architecture being this field that was meant for approaching the question of living together to then, how could we really find ways to practice in a more solitary way, in a more understanding way.

YF:
Cruz, I'm curious to hear how you are thinking about this—redefining what it means to be an architect.

CG:
I think what Nathalie saying, there's... I think I’ve got to talk about several things at the same time. On one hand, there's this definition of Ludwig Wittgenstein that we love that is from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where he says, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." I think, also, the limits of my language limit how you can define something, architecture being there. I also had to bring... We were recently doing an interview with Mabel Wilson, the architect and historian, for our issue that we're editing on reparations for the Journal of Architectural Education. And in the conversation, Mabel brought up this amazing idea that she's been discussing, that maybe we shouldn't be calling it “architecture.” “Architecture” has such a European, Latin connotation and it comes with a body of knowledge. And when you talk about the prison system, even parks can be also quite violent because parks are used to erase communities many times, too.

It is a very loaded discipline. The combination of "archi" and "tect" and all this. When you go in the first year in architecture school, everybody's always like, "Oh, what does architecture mean? So it is a combination of the space with this,” and it has a Greek mythology-type of connotation. And I love this text by Lesley Lokko, it's called African Space Magicians, and she talks about how in Zulu, the word for “architect” is space magician. And what does it mean when you think about being a space magician? What are the relationships to your environment? And in that way, we need more words to define what we're doing, because maybe it is architecture or maybe it’s not. Maybe it is something else.

And at some point we were really focused on redefining what architecture can be and should be and should be doing and addressing. But more recently, we’ve also been thinking about maybe there's other words that we need, other concepts that we need to bring in order to describe, really, what this world-making implies, on one hand. And also if architecture is historically problematic, how can we dismantle it and unbuild it, right? Because there's on one hand... But as you say, the people that lay out plans and drawings for constructing things. But if those things are the enemy, how we also open up the possibility of taking those things down, demolishing them and abolishing them. So there's something interesting there as well. I think the constant redefinition of what we do and what we think about, it gets to a point where we start even questioning the very premise of the word, of “architecture” or the architect.

YF:
“Space magicians” sounds so playful, sounds so inviting. I love that because there is this, I think, wall that goes up when someone talks about architecture. It feels so, I don't know, I guess it feels so elite. It feels like something that you need to be invited into versus something that you can just explore on your own. But that term “space magician,” it feels much more welcoming and I think a term that folks can feel much more interested by. So I kind of love that.

CG:
And it's really interesting because as you mentioned at the beginning when you said, "I'm new to this field or I'm just paying attention to it," and I always think that it's not possible. All of us are… especially what you do, you are so much embedded into thinking about the environment, and the built environment is architecture in that sense. But it's… the way that we use “architecture” makes it feel like something unattainable and professionalized, and that's really interesting.

CG:
Exactly going with what you were saying.

YF:
I mean, it feels artistic. I think about those— “the European architecture of the 17th century.” I mean, I'm just making up timeframes.

CG:
No, totally, totally, totally, totally.

YF:
But that's the vibe that I think people have when they think about it. But you're right, it's so much more; it connects to us in much more ways than history. And we've been alluding to a lot of the harms that architecture has played. I like the term that Nathalie used to describe pieces of architecture as “violent.” And we've been alluding to some of this throughout our conversation so far, but I think it'd be good for us to get a little explicit in sharing and breaking down for readers the way that architecture relates to the climate crisis, to social injustice, and how architecture could serve as an avenue for decolonization. I think that there's some important potential here.

CG:
Well, recently we've been... We're about to republish or to publish for the first time, physically, our Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education. And in that process we've been also developing some new diagrams that try to explain how the very idea of modernity, be it the Enlightenment, be it the construction of concepts like history, science, logic, are deeply embedded on the footprint of the plantation. On the footprint of capitalism. On the footprint of white supremacy. The first thing that is done once colonizers arrive is to claim the land, is to plan, to make architecture, to make buildings, to make plantations. And in order to maintain that, and to produce crops that are going to bring cash, they enslave people. So there's a really, really close and problematic relationship between that architecture, the architecture of modernity in the Eurocentric sense, and the footprint of ecological spoliation and genocide. Ecocide and genocide are tied by that colonial footprint. That is super architectural. And that's why today many of the big questions, the struggles, whether it's with the climate crisis or Black Lives Matter or the Indigenous struggles around the world, are super architectural. They have to deal with destroying the environment with the energy needed to produce and maintain cities that are usually where wealth is accumulated. And all that comes from that legacy. Also, there's scientific papers that connect the beginning of the Anthropocene with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and the millions of people that died, and how nature was not taken care of for the first time in that period and the CO2 emissions dropped. And since then, it has been increasing ever since. There's scientific papers that connect it to that.So we can see that relationship between death and architecture and the environment, the decay of the environment, and it is all tied up. That's why we also talk about the relationship between ecological justice and questions about race and gender, for example, how historically disenfranchised communities are the ones that are the most affected by all these questions. But again, architecture is always an enabler in all of this. It's the tool that is used to create the colony to consolidate the power of the occupying state.

YF:
Right. And hearing you talk, it reminds me of, I think, this reality that a lot of us who live in cities and who live in urban spaces—it's easy for us to forget that at some point in time, whether that was hundreds or thousands of years ago, the places where we live now are not what they are. There was a time... I live in Queens, New York, and there was a time where... We have a tiny forest park here. I imagine there was a time where that forest was not just a park, but it was actually all of this land.And to imagine what had to have happened to the ecosystems and the wildlife and the nature and the peoples who were here in order for these buildings and these roads and these lights and sewage systems and all this infrastructure that allows us to live here—what had to have happened to what was there before, in order for us to be existing here, is quite profound. And I don't think many of us actually pause to ruminate on what was here before we were here. And it's an important point that you're raising because it opens up space for that thinking.

CG:
Totally. And not only that, but the fact that to maintain the energy that is needed to maintain the production of the city comes, also, from other places. All the materials, resources, all the energy, it's still extracted for places like that. So that's also how we cannot really lose sight of the footprint of all these things and how this actually is always a planetary question.

YF:
Yeah, it's ongoing and that's why we are where we are, in terms of grappling with the climate crisis. I know that education is such a big part of the work that you all do as well. And your platform, Loudreaders, is one where you hope to educate more folks about architecture, but also the connections that architecture has with all these other realms. Can you break down for folks what Loudreaders is, how it works, and the importance of educational resources like it?

CG:
So building on that legacy that we talked about, a bit of the plantation, we like to think of Puerto Rico being the oldest colony in the world, invaded in the second trip by Columbus, being 400 years a colony from Spain, 120-something years from the US. There's a form of knowledge that is born in the Caribbean that we feel is really important to understand the resurgence of micropolitics and microcapitalism in the world, the rest of the world. As the world gets warmer, in a way it gets tropicalized, so to speak. At the same time, some avant-garde design schools were taking place in Europe, and that's what we get taught in school. “Look at Bauhaus, look at this school making beautiful design artifacts and objects,” even if they have a really problematic relationship between gender and race and so on.

We found that this school in the Caribbean that was all over the place, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, in Cuba, but also in Durham, in New York, were workers in the tobacco factories—this is talking about the plantation and the occupation and capitalism—workers in the tobacco factories that were denied any means of formal education. And we had to remember that some of these people are either former slaves or the children of former slaves.

They don't have access to education, so they will pick one of their own, that knew how to read, to read for them during the entire workday. That's where the concept of “loudreading” comes from. Soap operas come from that tradition. But also at the beginning, the practice was mostly done by men, until there's people like Puerto Rican anarchist, syndicalist, organizer, and utopian author, Luisa Capetillo, that was this amazing, eccentric, hardcore organizer. She was arrested several times for wearing pants in public. She writes books about free love and feminism, and she used to run, in New York, restaurants and boarding houses, where she would serve delicious vegetarian meals for workers even if they didn't have any money.

So the literature that Capetillo would read in the factories—it was not only the classics like Dostoyevsky or Victor Hugo and newspapers and stuff like that, but she would loudread political theory like Marx and Engels and Kropotkin and Bakunin, anarchist philosophy and communist philosophy. And she would also read out some of her own fiction that she wrote, fiction where workers would rob banks and live happily ever after in the countryside eating delicious vegetarian meals.

So she was helping forge an anti-capitalistic imagination, and workers would organize and strike and there would be tens of thousands of people striking. There were other organizers, like Juana Colón, for example. It was not only for the workers, it was also for the unemployed and so on. So there was all these amazing women—mostly, in this case; really important women—organizing and making this huge movement. And the practice, of course, it became illegal. Persecuted people got shot and killed by the police and the corporations in the newly occupied territory of Puerto Rico, by the US. It used to be occupied by Spain.And then the practice changed and she was persecuted. And then in 2016, with what's happening with Black Lives Matter... First with COVID, right? COVID pushed the students, they couldn't attend the university anymore. They were left hanging in many places. All these places that make you pay a lot of money, also. And they were not really taking the responsibility or providing any protection to students. And we thought, in the same way that the loudreaders were using the space of capitalist exploitation for generating some form of anti-capitalist imagination, maybe we can reappropriate the tools of exploitation that we have in the university. Like Zoom, stuff like that. And reappropriate it to provide space for networks of solidarity. And then we started this platform that was already building on our practice we had from our Post-Novis Collective, where we started making these planetary syllables of the anti-colonial thinkers.And we wanted to see, how can we make this as an education practice that is not only us as a collective of artists and architects and designers and writers, but rather a popular thing? And in 2016, we started the platform. We said, "Let's make 'Loudreaders' a thing." Take these spaces, virtual spaces, and provide. Invite people, philosophers, thinkers, activists, so they can loudread and present something and it's going to be online, free, and accessible for everybody, a growing archive. And then it's been a couple of years doing this. Sorry, 2020, 2020, right? I'm saying 2016, I'm confused. In 2020.

YF:
Okay. I was going to ask. I was like, wait, was it 2020 or 2016? Okay, so this was born out of the pandemic. So Loudreaders was born out of the need that you saw from students and the abandonment that they faced from these educational institutions.

CG:
Yeah, there was this critique of alienation. Not only are we alienated from our means of production, but also alienated from each other. There was a point, especially–I've seen a lot of international students, they had to even leave the campus and leave Pittsburgh, the middle of a place that they didn't know. And I was like, "Man, it’s kind of brutal." Then we started discovering how in Brazil, the universities closed from one day to the other and the students didn't even know what to do. So it was a real planetary thing too, where people were in a way abandoned by the institutions.

CG:
And we felt like, “I think there's something we can do to challenge that alienation.”

YF:
And so how does it work? Someone that you all invite, there's like an activist, a thought leader, an expert of sort, they record a video? Or they're loudreading something that they've put together or reading from someone else? And that's shared online digitally for other folks to access at no cost?

CG:
So there's different ways. Some of them, it's like that. We invite somebody or somebody says, "I would like to do loudreading." And sometimes they read the books that they wrote or some really influential books for them, like [inaudible 00:32:11] loudreading Kropotkin, referencing the same books that Capetillo was referencing. Or [inaudible 00:32:21] loudreading bell hooks—Octavia Butler, sorry, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Or [inaudible 00:32:32] reading some of his own poetry or... Then we have run a literal trade school for 10 days, an experimental trade school that was free and everybody could do several workshops and lectures and seminars a day. And we do all these workshops online and it's all available. You can download the files even after the thing is done, but also you can enroll and do it live.Also, we are planning to do one in person in Puerto Rico next summer, a 10-day program, also, with people coming from the Pan-Caribbean, this really big zone of really important knowledge. And so, the idea is that it has become also a publishing platform space for a growing archive. And having people from all around the world, like people loudreading from Beijing or loudreading from Cape Town, like the Wolf or can cite The Clerk. Or having people loudread from Ciudad de México or from Santiago de Chile. Or from Brussels or from the Dominican Republic. So the idea is that there is, in the same spirit of the loudreaders, there is this network of people that are willing to share knowledge, to foster networks of intellectual solidarity.

YF:
And why do we need these types of educational resources, especially in regards to the disconnect I think the public has with architecture?

NF:
If I can just add something that ties up on some of the discussions before, is exactly your point. I think also something that was really important for us, from the beginning of our practice, is to try to find different platforms that would widen the discussion around architecture, but try also to approach architecture really more as a collective practice, in a way that we need to acknowledge all limitations.And I think really early on that was something that was really important for us, to always try to learn from each other. And I think that's also a problem when we think a lot about architecture—is, again, how strong the impact is on everybody's life, but how exclusive the field really is. So how can we think of a profession that wants to bring answers to others, but that doesn't want to include others in discussion?So I feel like... And going back to the platform of Loudreaders, again with Capetillo, was so inspiring for us because not only did she create the platform, but she also had the idea that other people would become loudreaders as she would be... It's not even teaching, it's more about exchanging, exchanging knowledges, to bring other people the tools and the capacity to do that, too, and to find other ways to express themselves. Even she would organize workshops for writing. The other workers, also, would create plays, write fictions with her. So I feel like, also, that's something for us that is really important is—how can we expand, always, the idea of a collective or network? How can we include more and more people? Learn from each other? Alone, I feel we are so limited. So we really believe in the power of a collective and that's what brings us hope, especially when we think of a profession such as architecture. And going back to what Cruz was explaining, all the implications, the really real and violent implications that the field can have in everyday life and thinking of the future.

YF:
Yeah, it feels like a really powerful way to wrap up our discussion here, Nathalie. I'm asking all of our guests to share a quote to end our episode, and I'm curious to hear what quote you all might share to... That helps keep you inspired and that signals the world that you all want to see.

CG:
I'll just share a quote that is the quote that closes the Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, but also is one of the opening statements of our collective, Post-Novis. "The only purpose of education is to make new worlds collectively. This requires the practice of curiosity as a daily habit and the exercise of dignified and purposeful rebelliousness. Other worlds are possible."

CG:
That's from the introduction to the syllabus to the Tobacco Intergalactic School (Post-Novis branch in the Americas).

YF:
Definitely feels like the theme of “another world as possible” is going to be a big one throughout the episode and throughout the podcast at large. So thank you so much Cruz for sharing that with us and thank you Nathalie, as well, for being with us and sharing your expertise. Really, really, really excited to introduce Loudreaders to our listeners and to see how you all continue to shape the field.

The Architectures of Planetary Well-being podcast Season 1 is hosted by Yessenia Funes and produced by re:arc institute. In this episode, host Yessenia Funes catches up with climate activist Ayisha Siddiqa. Ayisha Siddiqa is a Pakistani Climate justice advocate based in New York. She is a co-founder of Polluters Out and the Executive Director of Student Affairs at Fossil Free University. Her advocacy focuses on climate justice and racial justice for BIPOC. Join us as we explore Collective Responsibility, take a look back at the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) 27, unpack the current state of global environmental policy, and reflect on the importance of making spaces for education and creative expression in advocacy work.

Collective Responsibility with Ayisha Siddiqa

Yessenia Funes:
As this episode comes out, the International Climate Negotiations known as COP will have happened many months ago back in November. COP27, the most recent summit in Egypt, was a pretty notable one, because world leaders finally agreed to establish a fund to provide financial support for low-income nations that are suffering the effects of climate change despite doing very little, if anything, to have created the crisis. This is climate justice in action. I share all this because in this episode, we'll hear from youth climate activist Ayisha Siddiqa, who attended COP27. We spoke not long after she returned from Egypt, so COP is a big focus of our discussion, especially because a lot of Ayisha's climate activism focuses on kicking polluters, like big oil, out of these negotiation spaces.

The design of spaces like COP is why we're still here talking about climate change 27 years after they began. But COP is not all we talked about during our conversation. Ayisha is also a poet, she's from Pakistan, and she writes from a place of grief and heartbreak for her people, for our planet. Her identity and lived experience guide her activism. She draws connections between the powerful and the vulnerable, reminding us of our collective responsibility to address climate change, especially given how little our elected leaders are doing. Ayisha's not afraid to remind a room full of powerful people that her people didn't create this mess. She's always creating and sharing tools to help us clean this up by holding the powerful accountable.

This is The Architectures of Planetary Well-being podcast. I'm your host, Yessenia Funes.

Hello, hello, hello everyone. I am here today with Ayisha Siddiqa, who is a climate justice activist based in Coney Island, New York, where Superstorm Sandy tore through 10 years ago. Since then, she's focused her energy on climate justice. She's the co-founder of Polluters Out, a group focused on removing fossil fuel interests from climate negotiations. Ayisha is also a poet, and a damn good one.

Ayisha Siddiqa:
Hello. Good morning and thank you for having me.

YF:
Thank you for joining us, for making the time. I know you're a very busy person and that you've had a long last couple of weeks, so I really appreciate you coming through.

YF:
Thank you, Ayisha. As you all can probably hear, Ayisha and I are both a little under the weather, so just bear with us. We're giving you our sexy, raspy voices today. Well, really excited to introduce you to our listeners and to talk a lot about your work with Polluters Out, your journey. We've been in touch now for—it's been a few years now. I don't know if it's been three or four years. Or maybe it's only been like two. I'm trying to… I can't quite put my finger on it.

AS:
No, I think it's been longer. I think it's been... I was still in school when I first started speaking with you on the phone or on the train.

YF:
Always bugging you for those interviews.

YF:
And the first time we spoke, it was about Polluters Out, which you had just kicked off. You co-founded this organization with other climate activists, Isabella Fallahi and Helena Gualinga, with the hopes of making COPs—these are the climate negotiations that happen once a year—you're hoping to make them free of polluting industries. Can you introduce Polluters Out to our listeners, let them know what triggered its launch and where it's come so far?

AS:
Yeah, so Polluters Out was triggered, I suppose, because the year prior, my friends and I—internationally, within Fridays for Future—had organized massive protests. And those protests accumulated in a grand, old nothing. And they were followed by the conference in Spain, and that conference was also full of fossil fuel lobbyists. In fact, it was sponsored by Iberdrola and Endesa, Spanish oil companies. And in 2019, due to the lobbying influence, much of Article 6 within Paris, that focuses on autonomy of Indigenous peoples—it was edited and rights were taken from them. And so the COP that unfolded in 2019 was one of anything but equity, I suppose. And the reason why we formed Polluters Out was A, it was so obvious to us—as somebody who had been working internationally, maybe for five, six months only—it was so obvious to me that the problem was where the money was coming from. If you followed the money all the way back to 1992, the same people who had caused a problem were sponsoring this annual Coachella to solve it.

YF:
I love that. I love that description that y'all have as like, COP as this Coachella-sponsored, like, festival where climate people come together, but nothing happens. Nothing really changes. I mean, this year, perhaps, folks might differ a little bit there. And I'm curious to hear how COP27 went for you. I know that you had just gotten back, and it sounds like it was an exhausting and intense two weeks for the people who were there, given the political climate in Egypt but also given the political climate of the negotiations. Curious to hear how that went and whether you think things have improved since the years that you launched Polluters Out. I'm curious about the trends that you've been seeing and the overall culture at COP.

AS:
Yeah, so Polluters Out, we were quite successful last year in ensuring that fossil fuel interests did not sponsor the conference at the very least. By “sponsor,” means money that pays for the tables and the chairs and the pavilions. And that didn't happen last year and the names of the oil companies were not plastered all over the walls. This year was a completely different story. COP27 was… If the year before was a Coachella, this was a circus, frankly. Not only did you have... The second you landed in the airport, to when you got off the plane, was there greenwashing. And in the airport, at least, the greenwashing was coming from banks—Siemens Energy Company, Coca-Cola, Nestle, you name it. And then inside the conference, it was just like, polluters galore. There were more polluting lobbyists or representatives of polluting companies at this COP than there were last COP, than there were last COP. There were like 623, I think.

And our campaign of pushing the finance out has really... It came to a halt last year. And we weren't able to be as vocal [of] activists this year. But also, I think the campaign has began merging in with a larger campaign for fossil fuel non-proliferation with adult organizations and also seasoned activists. And so, it is not just calling for formally… It was calling for a conflict of interest policy within the UNFCCC, the nations who make the UN and then the fossil fuel companies. So, a conflict of interest policy that would ensure that their money didn't sponsor the event. Now, we are calling for a full-out Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation—not just money, not just the representatives, but the investments. And it's really, really going forward. Tuvalu has signed onto it. I think Vanuatu has signed onto it. Nation states are really… Those that are island nations specifically, those for whom their life is on the line, are signing on to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. And one of the clauses that we're pushing for within the treaty is what Polluters Out was asking for, which was conflict of interest. But to your question about how COP27 was, in addition to it being polluters galore, I was in Egypt for a month, so I was there from October 20th to November 20th.

AS:
And a lot of criticisms have come out of play. Why was the event held in Egypt? What about protest? What about the outcomes? And I think everything that we say has to be acknowledged with nuance.

AS:
So formally, the COPs have been in Europe and in Global North countries, or democracies, if you would. And people have come and they've protested and they've made a lot of noise. And what that protest and noise was met with was applause in the media. It was met with acknowledgements of bravery. I think it gets really complicated when you are in a nation with an authoritative government, but most of the world lives like this. And it was a reality check for the negotiators, it was a reality check for all of the Global North activists, it was a reality check for the politicians. Because this is a reality of so many countries, of so many people who are on the front lines of the climate crisis. See, we categorize vulnerability as proximity to, maybe, disaster, as percentages of how likely you are to be affected by said disaster. What we leave out, time and time again, is the vulnerability of citizens of unstable governments.

And, on top of that, the fact that those unstable governments do not care. And I think that COP needed to be held in a place like this, where if you walked out in the streets with four people—which happened—and you stood in a place with a camera out, you were threatened with arrest, which happened to me and my friends. That these negotiations that are happening in rooms that are so closed from reality, that don't understand the complicated, complicated political context of the nations that many people come from need to. And if we are going to try to save life on planet, we need to work with, and those governments too. There was a victory of loss and damage finance fund for the first time in 30 years.

AS:
It's a big deal. And I think that big deal needs to be a little bit emphasized. So the way that negotiations happen, the way voting happens, the way policy happens is: 192 governments have to agree.

AS:
That's crazy. That means each word, each line, each stance in a 600-page document needs to be agreed upon. And then, and only then, is it established. That's why for the past 30 years, it's been a fight. There was always one country or two countries or three countries who vetoed it.

AS:
But for... Yeah, yeah, I'm sitting in one of them right now. But that changed, and that changed because of the pressure and allegiance and working together of the Global South, the island nations against the most developed countries. And I applaud, I really applaud, the activists, the negotiators from the island states, and the adults who worked night in and out for this victory. And yeah, people were up every night until 4:00 AM. Young people watching the negotiations would go home, go to sleep, maybe get three hours in, then wake up at 7:00 AM again, do a summary, and then do a day plan, action plan, for the next day. Sit in meetings, sit in panels, go speak to the negotiators, go do campaigns, go do actions, and then it would start all over again.

YF:
I mean, essentially, what y'all are doing is lobbying. Y'all are lobbying in these spaces, trying to push what you want to see happen. That shit's work.

AS:
It's work, it's hard. It's like, I know the World Cup is being played right now, and there's so many games happening. You are watching all of them. You're watching the scoreboard of all of them, all of the major gameplays. You're returning, telling your team about it, because you’re against all of them. You have to play against all of them simultaneously. And life is on the line. So, that was a victory. That said, I think it wasn't a full victory. And because we're doing a COP summary, it should also be acknowledged. For the past 30 years, the words “fossil fuel,” “coal,” and “oil” have not made it into the final text, time and time again. And what that means is, essentially, nations are not acknowledging that investing more in them is causing the climate crisis. And lack of said acknowledgement paves way for them not reducing their carbon emissions fast enough.

And so losses and damages just accumulate when you emit more carbon, when you keep pumping out oil. And right now, the finance facility is supposed to be home to 100 billion dollars. If the way that we are going is left unchecked and uncharted for another five years, that 100 billion will become 400 billion, will become 600 billion. And there will come a time where they will have no money to stop or put an end to the loss and damages, if we don't put an end to the emission of fossil fuel in the first place. I think an analogy I can share to understand this problem is, basically, we were given an empty bucket in a flood. One empty bucket. And the tap is still wide open and water is being pumped out, and we're given a bucket to start taking that water out. We need to close the tap.

YF:
And we need a lot more than a single bucket.

YF:
It's not going to be enough. And I want to make sure that we contextualize, quickly, for the listeners who might not be familiar with loss and damage. This is the financial mechanism by which wealthy countries that have largely contributed to the climate crisis—their emissions, our lifestyle here in the US, Canada, European nations, the ones that actually created the climate crisis—are paying funds into an account that will help support low-income countries that have contributed very little, if anything, to the climate crisis, so that they can respond to disaster, adapt to prevent disaster, and overall have a safety net to prevent such loss and damage in their communities. And so it's been a really key mechanism to climate justice. People have called this “climate reparations,” a form of climate reparations. There's many different ways of looking at climate reparations within the space, but this is one clear avenue there.

And so the fund has been established out of COP27, though the specifics of that are still quite unclear. And my understanding is also that no country is going to be legally liable toward this. And so it's not as though they're actually required to put money into this. So we'll see who actually will. Denmark has already pledged money; they were the first, so kudos to Denmark. But unfortunately, we haven't seen these types of explicit pledges anywhere else yet. So we'll have to see how that plays out. And you were talking a lot just now, Ayisha, about the different lived experiences of folks, like in Egypt, the reality that people experience in different parts of the world, and ensuring that people are being met where they're at, and that we have an understanding and a lens on that. And I think, in general, lived experiences and this embodied knowledge is a big part of your practice. I think it's a big part of your advocacy.

How has this translated in your work with Fossil Fuel University's educational practice? Could you briefly introduce that part of Polluters Out to our listeners and make those connections between lived experience and this educational practice?

AS:
Yeah, so Fossil Fuel University is so close to my heart because it was a project that came out of not being able to mobilize in person during the pandemic. And me and some amazing lawyers came together and were like, “what would be the one-on-one tools that you would need if you were a young person trying to take on big old oil?” And we put together this free resource platform that has lectures from former negotiators within the UNFCCC, the EDs of major NGOs that we all know of, like Amnesty and Greenpeace, lawyers who have been working in and against their governments or the law to change the course of climate change as we know it. And so many wonderful experts.

And then also people who have on-ground experience, as you were saying, Yessenia—people who have fought pipelines with their bodies. And Fossil Free University is an amalgamation of all of that, on lived experience and the importance of that. I cannot highlight that enough. I think that when people hear that an activist uses storytelling or their lived experience or advocacy from a point of their lineage and their heritage, it is taken as these anecdotes and perhaps these empty platitudes that don't translate into policy or change. And oftentimes I'm asked, “why are youth voices important?” and “why are Indigenous voices important?” Because I think from an empirical point of view, people don't think we can solve the problem with our stories.

AS:
Yeah. Not only stories change hearts, but lived experience. And the urgency of that is the reason why we have a 1.5-degree mark; is the reason why we have the words “loss” and “damage,” and then they were developed into a facility, and that facility had work done on it for 20-something years; is the reason why we have a Rights of Nature. And there's just…. I can start listing so many policies, but that is all due to the experience of the island states, the experience of Indigenous people and also their advocacy. The language that we are taking for granted, the policies that we are taking for granted, did not come without people fighting to the tooth and nail to keep their stories alive.

YF:
And I know that a lot of your work focuses specifically on the stories of you and your people, Ayisha. Your own roots are in a tribal and native community in Pakistan called Moochiwala. Am I pronouncing that right

YF:
And Pakistan in particular played a major role at COP. I know that it was leading some of the delegations there, after its devastating floods this year—I mean, record-breaking, unprecedented; 30 million people affected in Pakistan this year. I don't know that we've seen anything like this thus far. And scientists have already attributed this to climate change. You have a personal and a familial connection back home to polluted waterways. And you currently live here in Coney Island, Brooklyn, which has experienced its own severe flooding. Talk to me about water systems and, in general, just your connection to water, how you see this playing a role in your fight for climate justice. But I'm also thinking about the terrifying, violent nature that water can have in the face of climate change. There's this yin and yang, I think, that comes out of water. I’m really curious to hear your relationship and your perspective on that.

AS:
It's interesting to me, because I moved oceans away from an area that was being affected by water pollution, and I still found myself in proximity to disaster. And if that can tell you that anything, it's that vulnerable communities in the Global North and vulnerable communities in the Global South, especially when they're marginalized within their own country's political landscapes, live very similar realities. And it is because of race, class, and gender. So, Pakistan is a young nation. It has made a mark worldwide and its development has had to do a lot with it, especially our rivers. So, we are home to one of the oldest rivers on planet Earth, the Indus. It is also home to one of the first civilizations on planet Earth, the Indus people. Indigenous peoples that live alongside the Indus River are still alive. And it's one of the misnomers and miscommunications that they're dead and they're gone. They're still alive. They're as old as the ancient Egyptians, as old as the Mayans and the Aztecs in the Americas.

And Pakistan's waterways—I think if you want to understand this country's landscape and all of the potential issues around equity, take a look at its rivers and its waterways. So, all of the major rivers in Pakistan actually come through India. And history is important here because there was a separation. It was a bloody separation, and land was divided by colonizers; land was divided by the British and handed over. So because our waterways are not only connected, there is no land barrier between those countries. It is controlled, oftentimes, by the Indian state.

And we experienced flooding this year, we experienced an abundance of rain, but the country has gone through a dry spell before that. So the heat waves that predated the flooding, I think, were not given as much tension, and also they are 70% of the equation. And that kind of suffering paved way for this disaster of a flood. But we went through heat waves of unprecedented scale, as well: 122 degrees Fahrenheit, wet-bulb temperatures of 104 degrees, 107 degrees, lasting for seven hours, eight hours, 14 hours.

YF:
Even the nighttime, there's no escape.

AS:
There's no escape. And when you live in a rural community like my family does, and you still depend on wells for water, you have one generator for your whole house that brings electricity, and then there's load shedding, which is another major problem in the country. And there's no electricity for 16 hours, you don't have a fan, you don't have an air conditioning, you don't even have running water to combat the insane heat. On top of that, I began talking to you about the waterways, why that is important. Because we are a young nation, because we industrialized, what we ended up depending on were dams. Dams are a use and source of energy. But in the context of Pakistan, you are damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. Reason being, the dams that were built in the early ’70s and then ’80s were coal-powered, in the ’90s were coal-powered. Only recently, they're like a combination of hydraulic energy and fossil fuel.

But for my community specifically, they polluted our water and caused illnesses that we could not come back from. So there was a dam built in ’93, and then I think there was a dam built in 2005, or the beginning of a dam being built in 2005, around the River Chenab in Punjab, around my village in Moochiwala. And it released chemical toxins into the water. It caused polio and appendicitis and blood cancer and you name it. And illnesses that had not reached or touched this part of the community are now running rampant. And I lost one family member after another. Neighboring tribes not only lost their land to the creation of the dams, they also got ill; there were kidney diseases. And this is very much the reality of so many rural communities in the country that are still, to this day, undeveloped, underdeveloped, underfunded, undereducated, you name it. And the thing that is supposed to bring energy to them are the creation of these dams. And then the earlier fact that I was alluding to, our water is controlled by India. Sometimes, our rivers start running dry and Pakistan is having, after these floods, we're having a dry spell all over again. Our freshwater sources are running dry and then the dams don't work in full capacity, and it creates a whole ’nother mess.

YF:
And I'm assuming after all the monsoon rains and the severe floods, there's also water contamination going on. All these waterways went into people's homes, sewage, animals—just thinking of all of the mixing that goes on during any type of flooding event and how harmful that can be for groundwater, freshwater, and the time that takes to make its way out of the system.

YF:
Then there's of course the disease, that also breeds in the water.

AS:
And take—if we want to narrow down from an aerial view—take a rural community, like mine, for example. There's no sewage ways. They've been destroyed. There's no pathways. They've been destroyed. So the water has nowhere to go. And all the feces, all the animals that have been, like, rotting inside the water, the mosquitoes that have sat accumulated—there's no removing that. And if you do start process of removing, you toss it back into the river. And it just corrupts and pollutes the waterway, too. And the government or the army or the police has not come. They haven't come in months. They came in the very beginning, helped people get out, got them to safety, but they haven't come to get rid of the water. And in areas where you've been lucky and water has evaporated, after it's sat on the soil for weeks on end–let's say you're a farmer, your crop is destroyed, but worse than that, your soil is destroyed.

YF:
People forget soil is a living organism as well, or full of living organisms.

AS:
Absolutely. And the country—30% of its GDP relies on agriculture. We are an agricultural country. We provide cotton, rice, grain, and sugar. Those are our main exports. And the soil is now concentrated with nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesium at the very top. The animals in it have been killed, and those that are still surviving are not all conducive to an environment that's going to allow you to grow crop. So you have to pillage and revitalize the soil, and you have nothing. That is a reality of so many farmers and people and rural and tribal people in the country.

And disease, Yessenia—it is harrowing. When I was at COP, I met with two doctors, both who are in Pakistan on-ground in the region of Sindh. And both of them broke down, explaining to me how horrific it has been for young women and women in general because… So, we had an expectancy of 65,000 women who were supposed to give birth during the flooding, and many died on the bed because their bodies didn't have enough hemoglobin to support the childbirth of their babies, and babies died. And that was like stage one, because poverty, hunger, flooding, then no food for days at an end and being stranded. Then you give birth in a tense, tense environment; you pass away or a child passes away, and then give it three more weeks. And now dengue has spread like wildfire, malaria has spread, cholera has spread, and it's spread to children whose immune systems cannot fight it. Newborns in these hospitals, that were just created out of sheer necessity at the very last minute—they are too tense and the babies have cholera and it is… We don't have beds, we don't have drips, we don't have blood.

Food is getting more and more expensive. Pakistan just went through an inflation like never before. IRP, if 100 was equivalent to $1, now it's at like 200 something or 300 something. And the front line is no longer firefighters. It's no longer, like, police officers or the military. The front line are doctors. They are fighting every single day to keep people alive.

YF:
And I think it's easy to put this stuff out of your mind when the stories stop circulating in the headlines. But it's important for folks to remember. Even January, February, when people will hear this episode— there's still suffering happening in places like Pakistan that experienced these climate disasters months ago. The disaster doesn't go away after the rains stop or after the floods recede. The disaster continues. And I think that's almost what's the scariest thing about climate change. It doesn't just go away when the weather calms down. The sun can be shining and things can feel fine again, in that sense, but there's all the aftermath and the years-long impacts.

Poetry—I think it's quite fitting to talk a little bit about your poetry work, because I understand it's been a big part of your processing and healing, a big way to grapple and communicate and process all of this grief and all of this emotion. Talk to me about poetry as a tool, both as an individual, as understanding the collective and processing this loss. How has poetry helped you navigate all this?

AS:
Yeah. Poetry has been my personal bandage, I suppose, some solace. And it's deeply important to me because I came from a rural tribal community, in metropolitan New York, and I, for the longest time, didn't know how to communicate. Learning English was… English is my fifth language. It was a whole process and I was a reader as a kid—fantasy fiction. And I stumbled upon poetry and I felt very intimately connected to it. Intimately, because it feels like a connection back home, back to my people. We are an oral storytelling tradition. I was raised with stories, on songs. The importance of protecting the river and the water and land was embedded in my nursery rhymes. And my education really was… It was also why I had a lot of trouble in the US, because I grew up with so many elders and family and just constantly learning from them.

So I use it to… In times of extreme climate anxiety or stress, I use it to find my way back home. And also I use it to express all of the frustration, because using this... I write poetry in English, I use a colonial language. But it's my way of piercing that colonial language and trying to get at the heart of things. It's my way of breaking the structures of the English grammar and trying to communicate a truth that is universal. I write with broken grammar on purpose. I write like I would be speaking Saraiki, my dialect. And I translate it into English often, and it comes from a place of making up for a language barrier that I've had forever—in the US, in colonial structures, all across climate work.

YF:
I've been asking everyone to come to the show with a quote they want to share to wrap up every episode. But I'd really love for you, Ayisha, if you're willing to share a piece of one of your poems, just because your writing is so beautiful and it's so visceral. Would love for you to share some of that with our listeners today, if you'd be so generous.

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