a wild and beautiful world by Emily Johnston

"Cultural understandings can be very rapid, they can also be sometimes very resistant to change, which is part of the problem, but the evolution of culture is something we can and should think about in a very different way from biological evolution, which takes a long time--and the fact that cultural evolution can turn on a dime can be very encouraging, because it means that it could be that in the next ten years (in a fantasy) everybody's out in the streets, saying 'leave it in the ground'--the fossil fuel, that is."

This week I have something a little different. I was asked to take part in the Collective Climate Action lecture series for the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. These are the same folks who asked me to do a keynote five years ago, which turned into the essay that's in the wonderful book All We Can Save. I struggled with this one, as I struggled with that one, trying to honestly describe and also find power in the very complicated feelings that climate change instills in me as in many others. I'm going to keep working on this one too, because I think it will serve as the keystone in a book of essays. Meanwhile, I hope you find it useful, or at least interesting.

"If we had a climate leader like Anne Hidalgo, the Pike/Pine network itself, going from Capitol Hill, which is dense enough to support its own pedestrian zone and car-free streets, could be car-free or mostly car-free down to the water, there'd be this wonderful green interchange between Capitol Hill and downtown and there's really wonderful opportunities for a sustainable connectivity that we can't really conceive because every square inch of this city has to be handed over to the private vehicle."

"Because the one thing they will never have that we have is numbers, and moral high ground. Most of us are doing this because we care, it's coming from a place of love, often we're doing it in our volunteer time--and the government and corporations will never match that."

"The clear-cuts were littered with these big old logs, they were just lying there rotting in the sun, and we asked Dominick DellaSalla, the scientist who was our tour guide, what's that all about, and he said 'they're really picky about which logs they bring back to market, so if they see flaws in the wood they'll just leave it behind...70% of the logs, of the old growth yellow cedar trees that are cut down, are left behind.'"

"Our ignorance of the soil really impedes our efforts to reach what I see as the holy grail here, which is low-impact, high-yield farming. There's plenty of high-impact, high-yield farming, and plenty of low-impact, low-yield farming, but neither of those are the answers that we need to find. We have this enormously challenging thing that we face, that we have to feed 8, and one day 9 or 10 billion people, while trying to bring that system back within planetary boundaries."

"The climate crisis that we have now, the environmental justice crises that we have now, are because there was not an investment or concern about the communities that are feeling the brunt of these illnesses when these facilities were being created, when these plans were being made. If we had cared about climate change, if we had cared about the environment, 40/50 years ago, when Valero Energy Corporation was planning to build in SW Memphis, we probably wouldn't have the cancer rates that we have now. If people had cared about all of these toxic release inventory facilities that surround our community, we wouldn't be dealing with the consequences of environmental degradation and environmental racism that we have now. The reality is that to show that we care, it does require us to show up differently, and that means consistently, persistently rejecting the status quo. "

"We need regulation, we need policy, we need community pressure, we need expectations, we need movies, we need poetry...we need all these things that drive us to a certain behavior, because we have got a lot of good sides, and they're not brought out by our current society and our current economic model, they are repressed and destructed by it. There's a great academic story about a guy who went to look for evidence that we behave badly under pressure--the whole dog eat dog market view of the world,  when things go bad we're going to be fighting for the food, fighting for shelter, and...all the apocalyptic movies, The Road, etc...and there's a side of us that can behave that way, but his view was that the academic evidence was not just not supportive, it was the opposite--that when we have a wildfire, when we have a flood, when we have a really intense threat to a community, the community comes together, and it comes together because it needs to in order to protect itself, and that's a natural tendency of humanity, not something that we need to be forced into."

"Standing Rock was like the beginning and the end of various parts of my life. I feel like I was asleep before Standing Rock. When I took my children out there it became more about recognizing our place on Earth as human beings and realizing that if we don't have our children in those spaces, how are we going to pass that knowledge on, or how do we expect them to stand...as much as I would love to say that our youth didn't have to stand on the frontlines, but they're inheriting what's been created already, and so unfortunately we are left to create warriors to continue this work that we're doing."

"Start by just learning the names of the bumblebees in your garden and the butterflies that fly past your room, of the birds, and it's not hard...and once you open that door, once you start, it's this neverending unfolding field of wonders, as crazy and naive as that sounds, and I wouldn't be able to live my life without it."

Just a quick hello to note that the second season is coming soon! My guests will include cultural educator and mountaineer Rachel Heaton, lawyer Lauren Regan, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson, and writers Adam Welz, Paul Gilding, Ursula Goodenough, George Monbiot, Paul Koberstein, and Jessica Applegate. Stay tuned!

"The issues that we attempt to suppress and sweep under the rug--or repress, which means we sweep under the rug unconsciously—they don't go anywhere, they just go in the darker crevices of our mind and then, like poisoning in groundwater, they seep into us, unconsciously, and we feel stressed and anxiety, and when it reaches a certain level we become more aware of it, and when we don't take action is that it just keeps poisoning us, building up, we know over and over again, and studies show this, that when people start to name the problem and figure out a strategy to address it, that their anxiety goes down."

"To me, that is the power of poetry, where we can take these fragments of our lives, of our psyches, and of our emotions, and to really conjure something new—not necessarily something whole and complete, but something that's beautiful and something that's empowering and inspiring from these ruins of history and migration and so on, and so that's why I really wanted to explore the fragments in my poetry and to weave these fragments together into a new tapestry, not necessarily something completely formed, but it's something that gives me a sense of self, a sense of culture, a sense of place, a sense of belonging as well."

"One of the words for which I haven't been able to find an English equivalent is the word 'nyingjey'...you'll hear Tibetans say this word very often, if you have a friend who is a little bit down, or there is a suffering animal nearby or a wounded bird or a wounded deer on the road… nyingjey, nyingjey. It's an expression of compassionate empathy, but it's not exactly the same as pity or 'poor you', that doesn't capture it, it's much more of an offering of solidarity. You're trying to almost…becoming one with the other that's suffering, so eliminating the distinction or the line that divides us."

"It's about being a part of, and participant in, a world that is shot through with loss, predation, grief, and yet it's all that shadowed difficulty that also makes this world so exquisitely beautiful, so holy."

I had some scheduling issues with folks, so I took this opportunity to do a short episode that attempts to begin to tease out some of the overlaps and intersections of my guests so far, and where those might lead. 

"The ability to imagine what it's like to be inside another person's mind or another person's life is the beginning of compassion...and it seems to me too that moral imagination is a necessary condition for hope. When you set out to think of something new, then you have a reason to think it might be possible. If you can't imagine anything better then you'll never be able to act towards achieving it. I believe you can imagine a better future into existence."

"Sometimes [kindness] means waking people up, and that's what movements do...when we build movements, one of the reasons we do it is to bring people back to attention."

"I do think it's very important to be connected to your place, even if those places change, you have to be a student of that place. So this is what we've tried to teach our kids, is that wherever you end up, that you become a steward of that place, you become a student of that place, and you look after that place because you are part of it. When you go into that new place, you are now part of it. The animals are going to know you, they're going to be affected by what you do, the water is going to be affected by what you do, the air is going to be affected by what you do, so you need to understand your role in that ecological fabric and be a good citizen in that ecosystem. And that just goes for wherever you end up."

"We have an economic system that is very profitable for the winners, and they're not that interested in the level of change that IPCC report after IPCC report is telling us we need: fundamental transformation of virtually every aspect of society….So how do we build the political power that wants that transformation?"

"We need to start to imagine what would it look like if we actually built a civilization that was designed from the outset to set the conditions for all people to flourish on a regenerated, living earth."

Just a bit of stage-setting for how I came to this podcast, and what I hope to offer in it....

Who do we have to become, in order to preserve the chance of a wild and beautiful world that includes humans?