Enviro(ish) - Blog

Enable the Eco-Label

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 02:55:21 GMT

We humans categorize each other. Even from our youngest age, we group similar objects and people together. Yet, we reject when those categorizations apply to ourselves (even to the point of irony...see: my fellow Millennials reject the label "Millennial").

The reason is simple: when we accept or adopt a label it becomes part of our identity.

Many years back when I started Enviro(ish), I started it on a principle in the wake of this truth. I proposed that we should not get hung up on the label and just do eco-friendly things in our day-to-day. This is still true, in part...meaning yes, please continue to do eco-friendly things. With the way 2020 is going, here's hoping some people reading this don't leave their lights and faucets on and put recyclables in the trash out of spite. But I digress.

As my Enviro(ish) conversation has continued, and as the systemic nature of the climate crisis has reared its ugliness, and seeped more deeply into our collective conscious, I've been spending more time thinking whether my theory of change of Enviro(ish) is really enough. Is it the only thing that matters? That answer is no. It's no longer "do eco-friendly things and don't worry about being labeled an environmentalist." I fervently believe now it is "do eco-friendly things and embrace being an environmentalist."

Nearly every conservative I know in real life enjoys hunting, fishing, visiting our national parks and/or getting outside in nature. Newsflash: this makes you an environmentalist. In this starkly regressive period of the Trump Administration on all the issues I care about most, there is a bright spot. Do you remember when Congressman Chaffetz (R-UT) tried to sell of 3.3 million acres of public land and utterly failed? I do. I have posted before about how the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were passed on a bipartisan basis, but I feel the need to remind people these foundational laws for environmental protection were signed by a Republican President. Environmental protection use to be universally agreed upon. (And while I have you here, President Nixon also started the Environmental Protection Agency.)
(Read more after the jump)

"Nixon signs the Clean Air Act of 1970 as William Ruckelshaus (left), head of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, and Russell Train (right), chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, look on." Source

The concept that somehow our economy can be divorced from the resources in our environment - such as the underlying materials and sources of power that drive our economy - is a philosophy that has made us weak and sick. In the days of Rachel Carson, some of today's occurrences would have offended us all. Whole communities have undrinkable water, air that causes cancer en masse. An entire coast is in flames, and the Gulf Coast is pounded by increasingly intense storms that are so frequent we ran out of letters in the alphabet...and too many in society still shrug. "That may be true," they say, "but at least I'm not an environmentalist."

If you think I'm kidding about this, I'm not. Let me tell you about a close friend's comments when I started Enviro(ish). She said to my face that she loved it because I'm not an environmentalist. She was a friend who knew me before I was an environmental studies major and for every major life event since. (Seriously what now? Have you met me??) Her hatred of environmentalists was so strong that in order to be my friend she had to compartmentalize. Instead of rethinking environmentalists, instead of thinking maybe there are many ways for a person to be an environmentalist, she chose to re-label me. In order to stay my friend, she had to remove the label of "environmentalist" even though it's pretty much the first thing people say when introducing me. Even though it's a part of my identity that is deep-rooted in my purpose, career, and life.

This is the power of labels.

So suffice to say, I'm no longer friends with this person (I mean...imagine trying to stay friends with someone who hates the main part of you and tell me how that works out. We lasted about 4 more years. Good luck. Haha). However, I am friends with a woman who is moderate and doesn't consider herself an environmentalist. But let me tell you the actions I've seen her take, and you tell me. She:

buys local, organic milk that is hand delivered to her door
hikes 2-3 times a month in the foothills / mountains
buys fresh, local produce
made flyers to inform her neighbors that their HOA was planning to spread Round-Up in a protected area in her neighborhood
engaged with a local church to find an alternative to poisoning local prairie dogs, and found an alternative solution for the ecosystem

Wouldn't you say she's an environmentalist? At some point I said that we were both "conscious consumers" and she bristled at the term. After I explained what it meant though, she acknowledged the truth that she definitely is.

We run away from labels because they mean something. They mean we have incorporated that label at least in part - if not completely - into our identity. It means we have to worry about being seen or called a hypocrite because the world criticizes hypocrisy. Most importantly, we think that if we accept or own that label we have to own the full set of people who may identify with it too.

We don't.

You can be an environmentalist and not be the kind that goes onto an oil rig to chain yourself to halt production. You can be an environmentalist that believes in the power of business and the economy. You can be an environmentalist that most of the time buys the most eco-friendly items - especially big purchases like a car - and sometimes doesn't get that greenest option. This is me. I'm definitely an environmentalist, and you can be an environmentalist like me.

But who cares? Why does it matter if someone avoids the label or not? Why should you enable the label and embrace being an environmentalist?

In short, because we need you. Because as I sit here in the midst of 2020, we are awash in crises and systemic changes around. Most days I am lucky if I feel like I'm only up to my eyeballs and not completely flailing or drowning in the scale of the problems we face. I used to joke that when I started learning about environmental issues in college I went through an eco-depression. I remember walking out of one of my environmental economics classes in particular thinking "HOW CAN PEOPLE CONTINUE LIFE SO CALMLY". I look back at that simpler time as so quaint. This decade of 2020 has felt like all of the negative outcomes of the climate crisis are happening in real life, on an ever accelerating pace. The consequences from our decades of polluting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are ALL @ now, and the trend line is only getting worse.

It has made me reckon with my own philosophy and belief. A belief when I started Enviro(ish) that said labels weren't necessary and individual actions were enough.

We need you to buy organic and local, and we need you to take eco-friendly actions every day. But those actions alone are not enough.

We need to tackle the systemic issues, the structural ways our economy works and our politics fail at addressing the climate crisis and all other environmental pollution and injustice.

The climate is screaming at us. Youth have mobilized for over a year en masse to grab our attention already. Just when we want to get outside because we are cooped up inside with a global pandemic, the air isn't healthy or breathable because of all the fires. How many more signals do you need?

Do you want to have air you can breathe without headaches, cough or sickness?
Do you want water that you can drink from the tap?
Do you want food that isn't covered in pesticides that could make your family sick?
Do you want forests that aren't decimated by the expansion of pine beetles due to warmer temperatures?
Do you want to live anywhere near the wild places and not have the tradeoff be watching your home burn down?

If you said yes to any of the above, you are an environmentalist. It's as simple as that. Own it already. Enable the label and let it become part of your identity. Let it be in the back of your mind when you make purchases at the grocery store. And most importantly, let it be at your core when you vote for all levels of government this year.

Source

On the Courage it Really Takes to Speak Out

Sat, 09 Nov 2019 08:00:00 GMT

We as a nation are grappling with corruption and inappropriate conduct at the highest levels of power. Whether it is the White House, Hollywood, or corporate America...something about these past few years has broken open a multitude of stories that people bottled up or swept under the rug for years. I believe this breaking dam flooding us with news is connected with Trump. It's been three years to the day since I woke up for the first time and realized a reality television star was voted into the most powerful role in the world by 3 million fewer of my fellow Americans over the most unequivocally qualified Presidential candidate in my lifetime. Given that the winner was a man and the loser was female screams at me every day exactly one thing:

No matter how hard I try, no matter how much I follow the rules and play the game, a man who works a fraction as hard will always succeed before I do simply because I'm a woman and people don't like women who have power, especially when they seek power.

Look, we can argue about whether the above statement is objectively true all the time...I know there are exceptions....but this *is* the rule. There are study after study after study on the double bind women face that makes this the truth not just emotionally but experientially. Yes, for all women. This is the rule under which being female in America operates and something about the Presidency following this rule to the painfully egregious degree it did in the wake of November 2016's election made me confront its truth more directly than I had before. And the bottomless indecency, the relentless corruption, and the endless circus going on because of the current occupant of the White House reminds me daily of the inequality and unfairness I face as a woman because of this steadfast and oppressive rule of life.

In the wake of not being able to be in denial, what happened to me was a psychological and philosophical shift that will stay with me for the rest of my life, summed up as: "never again". I believe we got this outcome because like everyone else I know, I bottled up truths and swept them under the rug. I focused on optimism. We all tried to live in a state of denial and belief that equality is inevitable on the long arc of the moral universe. And we could comfort ourselves with famous words telling us that arc bends towards justice. Just nobody ask what forces actually bend that arc. Keep it to a superficial catch phrase, don't look deeper into what Nobel peace prize winner Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr really said.

But today I don't want to focus on the people in power or reflect on the inherent inequity of the situation. We do a lot of that, all the time. Today I want to talk about the passive way in which we respond to the courage of whistleblowers who disrupt that script. How we discount the actions by the people who come forward first, who testify at great risk to their livelihoods and sometimes their life to speak truth to power.

We talk about power being held to account as something obvious and inevitable. Abstractly it always is talked about with phrases like "of course", as though naturally everyone does it in real life all day every day.
Uh, N-O-P-E.

Look, not to go all hard-core Nazi history on you this early in a post, but everyone thinks they are Oskar Schindler and no one wants to admit they would've been in the Nazi party even though that math equation can't work out. More importantly, the majority of people would've been bystanders during that era of Germany: not actively perpetrating crimes against humanity, probably knowledgeable enough that something was amiss, and doing nothing about it. Go along to get along. That's human nature yo. That's where we're at.

So why do we persist in talking about whistleblowers as something run-of-the-mill we expect? Like their courage is so every day and common? I think that's because being righteous against oppressive power is so deeply in the narrative we have as Americans that it's part of our cultural DNA. Our country was founded by patriots who pushed back against a monarchy...who held power to account and founded a nation based on democratic principles and liberty, with a first amendment enshrining our freedom of speech and freedom of the press. We learn about that history in textbooks sanitized of not only the impact to indigenous communities and erasing the stories of non-white males who helped create that history, but more importantly, erased of the struggle to get there. We downplay the sacrifice because we know the outcome. We all know that the colonies defeat the British, that the North wins the Civil War and slavery ends, and we know that America and our Allies defeat the Nazis. Why focus on the messy middle when we have to get through 200 years of history in 2 months? Next decade please!

Today I want to reflect on the time periods when those outcomes were most unlikely and most uncertain. Because in order to truly appreciate the courage of someone speaking truth to hold power accountable, we have to marinate ourselves in the moments where its not inevitable at all and soak in the truth of how systems of power protect themselves. In order to understand the bravery it takes, we have to empathize with how much fear and abject terror a person has to overcome to speak up in the first place. The more powerful the person who is doing wrong, the more important it is to come forward, obviously. But also the higher the stakes, the scarier the threats towards the person who might speak out and the greater likelihood of irreversible, negative impact to that whistleblower.

And I'm not writing this down abstractly as a citizen. I'm writing this as a way to explain my absence from blogging these past few months. You see, I personally experienced something I knew was wrong in mid-June, a much worse second example that showed a pattern, and through a series of things that happened the week after, forces converged in my conscience and I was confronted with the choice every person in a situation like that faces: "do I speak up at great risk to myself and my future, or do I stay quiet and go along to get along".

Courage is one of my top five values and given the severe nature of the situation, I chose to speak up. This post isn't about whether I experienced this because of the organizations I volunteer with or where I worship or where I work. It's not about who I went to in reporting it. I want to level up to something more universal about the experience that applies to any power situation where speaking truth is somewhere in the range of hard to dangerous. Here's what I've learned in the still ongoing, painful aftermath of my decision to speak up....

1) Almost everyone grossly underestimates the fear you overcome to say something in the first place.

Do you think Christine Blasey Ford needed anyone to remind her that the person she was saying assaulted her was Brett Kavanaugh...nominee for a seat to the most important and highest court in the land: the Supreme Court of the United States? Or Anita Hill when she testified during the hearings for Justice Thomas? It sounds like a silly question, but believe me, it's not. I've lost count of how many people have emphasized to me how important / valuable / irreplaceable the person is who did those wrong things after I came forward. And at first this whole thing was a head-scratcher for me. To the first person or two who said it to me, I kindly reminded them that I already knew those facts. I remember voicing how acutely aware I already was of their importance because it weighed extremely heavily on my mind before I spoke up in the first place. I was naive enough to believe if I just pointed out the obvious here, that it would stop, that they would stop saying it. But after I realized people were going to keep saying it to me, my response has changed. Now, honestly, I just don't engage. I've gotten to the point where I find the reminder insulting and any person who says it not worth my time. If you spend any time whatsoever reminding me how important that person is, then thanks for clarifying the flexibility of your morals and showing me you don't get it at all. Bye, Felicia.

via GIPHY

2) Other people impacted by that person accurately assess your bravery.

There are a very small set of people who are on the other end: the people who have their own bad experiences with the person-in-the-wrong. The most important thing that I re-learned as part of this journey is there are always more people who have bad experiences. Always. In fact, I think it is very likely that even now, even with everything quote-unquote "transparent" [insert dripping sarcasm], I am still grossly underestimating how many people have had something inappropriate happen to them because of the exact same person who impacted me. Here's the thing, people who do inappropriate things are abusing their power. And just like absolute power corrupts absolutely, the more important they are and the more they get away with it, the higher the body count. So I can 100% guarantee you that if the person who has done something inappropriate or illegal to you is a very important person, they are 100% doing it to others. Probably many others. And those other people...they are gems. They are your diamonds in the rough. I hope you have the luxury of knowing at least one because they will boost your spirit when you need it the most. They will provide temporary inoculation from the inevitable gaslighting with meaningful eye contact or a quiet word. Because they know. They are the only ones who know exactly how hard it was to come forward in the first place. They know precisely the measure and full weight of what you did, what I did, what it took to say something in the first place.

Listen, I am not going to lie to you dear reader. I played rugby and I was chased by elephants in the South African bush so I have moments of grandeur where I believe I'm tough. This experience has worn me down so thoroughly I don't think I'm tough anymore. This person making me low grade miserable has made me feel weak and vulnerable every minute of every day. And if you've been there too...you know what I'm about to say. Having another human understand and recognize what you're going through is meaningful. It's validation when the person-in-the-wrong harms you further and the jerks under #1 make you want to scream.

via GIPHY

I have to be brutally honest here with you and with myself. Most days I think about how much smarter the other people are. Those people - the people who didn't speak up - are much wiser than I am. I think about how in spite of believing I know some things, and in spite of being ridiculously cynical on the way things work...that I'm still a profoundly stupid person for coming forward.

I don't need to look farther than Ambra Gutierrez or Ronan Farrow or Gretchen Carlson or Ellen Pao to know in my bones that speaking up comes at a severe, relationship-losing, life-altering penalty. And while those feelings never, ever go away, there are glimmers of hope. Those glimmers are delivered by the people also impacted by person-in-the-wrong. They look at me and without a word remind me that what I did was right, and that doing so against my own best interest was brave. It doesn't get me through but on the rough seas that toss me and turn me around, those moments are buoys I have desperately needed to catch my breath. And here's the thing, you definitely, for certain, need those glimmers of hope because....

3) The impacts are always significantly worse than you anticipated.

What I came forward about doesn't lead to threats to my personal safety at home, like it does for others. Journalists and whistleblowers face truly threatening situations around the world every day for speaking truth to hold power accountable. As I write this, the whistleblower on the Ukraine scandal was named by the President's son and is receiving death threats, and even someone who was wrongly identified as the anonymous White House senior official is getting death threats. This is no joke and very serious.

This is not my situation.

I would propose to you though, that speaking truth to power at any level is scary. Doing so for me did not threaten my life but it has threatened me in other ways. I knew that before I spoke up. I did a LOT of thinking before coming forward and I thought that maybe if I came forward to someone who could make it right and maybe if I kept it tight to just the really obviously egregious stuff...that maybe common sense would prevail, the person-in-the-wrong would feel checked on their behavior, and they would stop. Getting that person to stop the really obviously egregious stuff was the goal. And yet, I had a fundamental flaw in my thinking.

The extremely obvious flaw I realized later is:
a person who would do that really obviously egregious stuff in the first place makes horrible decisions and won't react normally when someone asks them to please stop doing really obviously egregious stuff.

The scenario I thought would happen was some form of a verbal "oops, it won't happen again," then turning around, quietly over time figuring out who came forward (i.e. me), and then some subtle payback. I genuinely expected this. I expected to have blowback, but I expected it to be under the radar and unprovable. I figured: that's the way the world works, buckle up buttercup.

The scenario that actually happened was right away being outed in front of others for coming forward and being taunted with justifications for why the really obviously egregious stuff was actually OK and how they would keep doing it. And within days of that, I was called a troublemaker and poison, glared at at, blamed for things, questioned and denied agreed-upon things. Person-in-the-wrong went full tilt (props to my bro for that totes apropos phrase here).

The aftermath is still happening - months later. It is swirling around me, and piercing me, and punishing me for coming forward. This is all still nearly every day and acute. And all I can think on is a question to myself:
"why did I think someone doing indecent things would ever act decently?"

"When someone shows you you they are,
believe them the first time"
-Maya Angelou

Having more severe impacts pile on adds to the difficulty for one simple reason: it makes you question your own judgment. I ask myself myriad questions of "how did I not anticipate this?" "this makes no sense, why are they doing this?" "why didn't I know better?" "why are they so relentless?" and "would I have still done this knowing what I know now?"

These questions are rhetorical and pointless. People accustomed to full use and abuse of their power will always behave in this manner. Given that I was already on the path of having come forward, my options became severely limited. I wish I could say that I'm like my fictional heroine Lizzie Bennet in that "my courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me." While I've exhibited moments of courage, I can't say the intimidation doesn't work. It does. The fear is gripping and it is suffocating. It washes over me with every new injustice and dart. All the more because the person-in-the-wrong has no decency to pause let alone stop; they have decided to turn a 20 mph speeding ticket into mach 10 hyperspeed damage. They are acting like the victim here, and they have zero chill.

Because here's the ugly truth about Harvey Weinstein...reporters may have won a Pulitzer for breaking the stories of his sexual assault and he may now be a pariah....but he had absolute control on the indie / art / awards scene in Hollywood for decades because he exerted his power ruthlessly without any inhibitions. There were women who went to the police and reported crimes with a recording as proof, and journalists who tried to publish stories that were all drowned for years before that dam finally broke in 2017. I picture myself like one of those women who came too many years before...I'm underwater and I'm pushed up against that dam wall hoping with the pressure in the situation there will be a crack...that maybe it will break so I will get to breathe oxygen once again.

N-O-P-E

These dams don't break. They break you. Women get crushed en masse every day for coming forward. Seriously, what was I thinking? What is one tiny human against Hoover Dam?

And let's talk turkey....what makes it so impossible is the infrastructure around the person-in-the-wrong because...

4) People you don't expect excuse and protect those in power in a way that makes it so much worse.

This can be summed up in one word: gaslighting.

Gaslight (verb):
to manipulate someone by psychological means to question their own sanity

I'll let you in on a secret: people in power who abuse their power got there because of other structures in place with people more powerful than they are. And almost every time, those other, even more powerful structures and people...they have something to lose if the person-in-the-wrong loses.

Bill O'Reilly stayed put at Fox News because Roger Ailes also sexually assaulted women too. Thousands of victims of sex abuse by Catholic priests could have been spared if not for the protection of leaders like Cardinal Law who moved the priests around to different churches and suppressed police reports.

So what do these authorities do when confronted by a group who prove that the person they want to stay in power has done really obviously egregious stuff? They ignore or try to talk people out of it and it works for most. They delegitimize to try to silence and it works for others by playing into the feelings we all have of being powerless. And to the person like me who came forward and has the worst of it, they gaslight. They pretend they can Jedi mind trick me into not believing what I actually see.

via GIPHY

Despite my greatest wishes, Star Wars and the Force are not real life. These are real things that have been said to me by authorities:

Some of my experiences didn't happen
I should have empathy for how hard it is for person-in-the-wrong
Person-in-the-wrong makes great decisions
I am being watched
My behavior is being analyzed in discussion with person-in-the-wrong and others
That person-in-the-wrong does not actually have power
I'm emotional
I ask too many questions

#BelieveAllWomen ....hahahaha. HAHAHAHAHA.

Hearing these statements comes at a toll. It makes the entire situation a whole lot worse. If I keep speaking up, I know I'll hear in another, new way how the problem is somehow my own mindset or behavior....and why would I want that misery to be repeated?

I'm afraid to talk further about what I do in the face of gaslighting, but I can say two things:

I am not the problem. Speaking up, saying something...that is not the problem. The behaviors and impacts from the person doing the really obviously egregious stuff is the problem. Period. Full stop. I have to repeat this to myself a lot, and if you ever find yourself in an unfortunate situation, I recommend you do too.
People have a sadly huge capacity to compartmentalize. As time passes in a situation like this, what happens is the true nature of people's character is revealed. And as the lack of character really shows itself....it becomes impossible to see those other people the same. The ones protecting the structure, the authorities, and people in positions who can make this better...I continue to hope for a fix from them. It adds salt to the wound when they choose not to.

I'm Catholic and so my faith tradition teaches me to forgive. It's pretty well summed up by a quote from Mother Teresa: "People are often unreasonable and self-centered, forgive them anyway". In this situation I haven't been able to yet....because it's not yet over. Principles on justice require the scope to be set in order to move on to the next steps. In order to forgive, in order to try to find justice that way, I feel like the harm has to have been in the past. How can I forgive when the extent of the harm is still stacking up? Do I forgive the past stuff knowing more is coming? At what point does my faith call me to speak righteous truth to power in this situation?

These are unanswerable questions but ones that I think about and struggle with every day, and especially because...

5) It's not just once, you have to continually find the courage to repeatedly tell your story in a way that is exhausting.

There was a point where I had to go back through and explain everything that happened to me to someone new. Saying it all again was brutal. I have found that I can get through a lot of what happened, the facts, without much impact. Those were things that were real, that happened, and being asked to explain them is something I want to do out of hope for a better outcome. However, when I talk about the impact it has on me going forward...I can't talk about that without tears in my eyes.

When the circumstances all came together earlier this year I felt I was on a precipice. I could chose to turn around and walk away, which many people before me did. I instead chose to look down and see what I could, to think about it and really evaluate this choice. I weighed the high likelihood it would happen again in the near future to me. While I couldn't see the safety net, I was told by people I trusted it was there. I asked myself if I would be able to live with knowing I didn't say anything. After careful consideration of these things and more, I stepped off that cliff.

I've been falling ever since with no end in sight.

In some ways I prefer the everyday freefall because although it's scary, and it takes a little bit of energy to focus and try not to panic, it's not directly causing me harm.

The ongoing stuff from person-in-the-wrong are like branches I hit on the way down. It takes energy to try and avoid those branches, to block my face, but sometimes I don't see them coming. Some of them scratch me up. But in the end, even if they make me bleed a little, its nothing I don't think can be fixed when this nightmare finally ends at the bottom.

But the conversations that make me relive it all can be worse. Going back through everything is like me hitting a jagged, rocky point sticking out from the cliff-face. It breaks me and bruises me, taking days to recover, and hurts me so much worse that I find myself wanting to be back freefalling and hitting an occasional branch. Freefalling is a breeze, literally, compared to that.

But there are times when reliving what happened to me is important in spite of the abrupt shock it causes system. There are times when expressing my pain, brutal as it is to relive it, is necessary. I do it only when required because it's exhausting and re-traumatizing.

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Dealing with the trauma is its own energy drain. It's why I haven't had capacity to write any blogposts. Combined with fear, it's why I haven't written about this either. I'm spent, and if I'm not spent, I'm frozen with fear.

I have taken her advice, and I fill my day with as many joyful things I can, through volunteering, at work, at church, with friends. I curate these things with purpose, to try to fill me up when this situation is an open spigot draining me a little bit every day and a lot on some days.

I'm still in a phase where the situation just keeps compounding. I feel like I'm daily hustling to try to process out the previous trauma so that I can take on the new trauma that's coming my way. Because it is. If I've learned anything these past months, when you mess with the bull, you definitely get the horns. Over and over again. And at this rodeo there is no clown to distract the bull; there is no one trying to get the bull away from me; there's no timeclock to stop and save me; there's no where to run except around floor of the arena because I can't get away or jump the sideboards. I'm getting gored by this bull and everyone is watching me bleed out...the other people who didn't come forward, the people who told the truth when asked because I had come forward, the authorities...everyone. Regardless of whether it's the freefall or the rodeo metaphor, I have to consider every day that maybe there is no end. Maybe I never stop falling. Maybe the bull never stops impaling me. Maybe this is my new normal.

Nothing to do but keep trying to get back up and keep trying. And when I think of what I tell myself in that moment of doubt, I say...

6) I have to believe there is possibility for something better to come from this, if not for me then for the next woman.

This is the last learning I have for you and I struggle with writing it down. Because it's measures my own hope. On the days where something bad has happened yet again, where the fear has gripped me, and on the days where I'm exhausted and drained...I don't have this optimism. There are many moments on those days where I don't believe this statement. On coming forward, I'm not ashamed, but I'm not proud. I feel...resigned.

But when a little time has passed, and when I think on it, I always come back around to here: to believing in what's possible like Tarana Burke says in the end of her TED talk. There are people who know what happened to me is wrong. Maybe something good isn't possible for me, but they are in a position to help the next poor soul, and I have to believe that they will. I hang my hopes on that possibility.

I just celebrated Diwali for the first time in my life with friends and coworkers. It is the Hindu festival of "victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance." With everything going on with me, it carried extra meaning. It reminded me of the time a friend said I inspire her by living out the mottos of my alma maters: Fiat Lux (let there be light) and Vox Clamantis in Deserto (a lone voice crying out in the wilderness).

I've posted before a quote from Suffragette...about how the woman wanderer seeking the land of freedom must go down the banks of labor, through the waters of suffering because there is no other way. She feels alone until she hears the feet of the thousands who will come after in the fight for women's right to vote.

Living my values in this life is a kick in the teeth and a punch in the gut. And yet, it's true that I know without a doubt that I am not alone, and I find courage in that.

And I know that the power of being a light for others may cost me in the short term, and may cost me dearly, but is the right thing in the end. I believe that light wins over darkness and I will make that bet every time.

And with that I'll end with thanks to Jon Lovett for this podcast conversation that made me feel more understood than maybe anything else has, helped when I needed it most and did indeed give me hope:

Ronan Farrow:
"So I hope people close this book [Catch and Kill] and feel hopeful because I feel hopeful looking at the people who refused to shut up even in the face of spin machines and smear campaigns and legal threats."

Jon Lovett:
"Its moving in reading it, its moving in reflecting on it honestly, because there's no siren that goes off when somebody is doing the wrong thing. There's no siren that goes off to tell you its your turn to say the right thing and speak out. The past few years we have seen so much misconduct across our government, in companies...and we have really relied on people who no one was gonna tell them to do the right thing. And in fact, there was a bunch of people around them that were doing the wrong thing and telling them to continue to do the wrong thing. Whether it is a whistleblower on Ukraine, or this person that managed to leak you documents on what Blackcube was doing, Rich McHugh, all these people that are still inside of a system that was telling everyone to just ‘go along to get along’. We have been so lucky and fortunate that these people have been willing to recognize that they were in a moment where they had to make a choice and they couldn't just pretend that they didn't have a choice.”

The River and the Wall - Reflection (Mountainfilm 2019)

Sun, 09 Jun 2019 02:53:33 GMT

This is first in a series to reflection on each documentary I saw at Mountainfilm Festival 2019. Each post will be a reflection on the documentary and a focus on the impact and the issue that documentary is raising. My goal is to share my authentic take on watching the films as a witness who cares about having an impact. This is not a film review. Spoilers are probably all up in this.

Like every American and likely every person around the world, we've all heard the sitting President of the United States talk about the wall. I won't do that justice by linking out to it. I've always said when the topic comes up in conversation that having grown up in San Diego, I realize how pointless a wall as a concrete barrier is. Pointless both because people find a way around it always, but pointless also in a greater sense. The amount of folks who crossed the border from San Diego / Tijuana everyday for commerce, for work, for recreation...it always was and continues to be high. I remember vacationing in Rosarito and Ensenada growing up. I remember my neighbor working in Tijuana, driving himself to the border and walking across to save time so his company would pick him up on the other side. The talk and rhetoric about the border has always been puzzling and annoying to me as someone from a border community. The rhetoric is so heated that other side from the United States could besome form of oozing evil that will come through any gap, when in reality, the border is an artificial construct in a way you really understand only by living near one. In reality it's always porous like Swiss cheese going in both directions, and we're better off economically, politically and as humans when we think about it this way.

I had heard that the monarch butterfly which migrates across the border by the millions was being threatened by Trump's border wall, and so was intrigued to catch this documentary at Mountainfilm 2019. The premise of the film is a fascinating concept. The filmmaker and a team of characters (literally and cinematically) will travel along the 1200 miles of the Colorado River that forms the border between Texas and Mexico from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico. Canoes or kayaks, sure. I fully admit that I didn't expect before immersing myself in the film that this would involve bikes and horses. Bikes for the first stretch from El Paso because the river is fairly dried up, and horses through the amazing wildlands of Big Bend National Park.

Check out this beautiful imagery from The River and the Wall webpage and read more after the jump.

As the team heads out, my frame of reference is only reinforced when they get to a gate near El Paso where Border Patrol agents are stationed. The Border Patrol agents let them through onto the other side of the wall, but they will still be on U.S. soil on the north side of the Colorado River. And it's in that moment that myself and everyone in the theater around me realized that everything about this story will be complicated.

Each of the team featured in the film have particular strengths along the journey that that undertake together, and add a richness to the conversations around the impact the wall will have on these areas. The conservationist Jay Kleberg has expertise as a bike rider, which doesn't prove quite enough for the team to get through the slogging, muddy conditions heading from El Paso. There's much comic relief from Filipe Deandrade throughout, softened by some tender moments of his own story of immigration and a moment that moved me to tears when they show his backstory of winning a National Geographic award and thanking his mother who sacrificed everything for him and believed in him. A heart-felt story of the importance in the midst of "the wall", to remind me that I do cherish the stories of immigrants strengthening the fabric of this country like my great-grandparents did for me.

Then as the team gets to the wilderness of Big Bend National Park, the ruggedness of the terrain causes them to switch to horses. They ride horses that filmmaker Ben Masters had trained from mustangs for a previous documentary, but even horses seem to be not quite enough to overcome the steep, rocky cliffs and box canyons they run into. Here is where my favorite character, the ecologist and field biologist Heather McKay comes into the foreground. She has been doing bird surveys along the route and had done one of her first field studies in Big Bend National Park.

The terrain is breathtaking as the team moves through it, and there's a moment of (at least for me) record scratch. It comes around the time they go into a town on the Mexico side for the first real meal in a while. Then the concept is discussed of how there is more protected acres across the Mexican border for this area, and there has been some discussion over the years to create an international park. Having personally been to the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park on the northern border with Canada - where the U.S. has protected significantly more than the Canadian side, but who's competitive and counting anyways (right?!) - I was shocked to discover that basically all of the pieces have already been created and put next to each other for an international peace park in this area and essentially just need a new label. Learning through research after the film that this idea dates back to 1934, I think it's an idea who's time has come.

Having grown up in a border community and caring as much as I do about conservation, this is a no-brainer. It speaks to the reality and power of working together across borders. It's not too surprising to find out that President Obama and President Calderon signaled interest for joint protection for this area. It did surprise me that President Reagan did with his counterpart back in 1983.

Photo from naturalresourcespolicy.org site:

But the Trump era experience is a daily trudge where all good ideas go to be strangled or warped, and we are all so focused on just surviving this period that we forget to thrive. We forget to dream of something bigger and greater. Something beyond us that will outlast us and be there for future generations like a Big Bend International Peace Park. I am grateful this film provided me a respite, a moment to think big.

Watching this film brings forth an awe for nature in a pure and raw form. We see canyons cut away by the river where the idea of a wall is laughable because no human could cross it. And the fifth character, Austin Alvarado, who is an expert river guide becomes front and center as the team canoes through rapids (no joke, rapids) and some calm waters too. We are always reminded of the powerful forces of nature, and how far away the team is from any support systems such as re-supplies.

And as lofty and high as the idealism brings you when going through this awe-inspiring national park, I came crashing back down to the ground for the remaining section.

Here's where the border wall is more actively being built. And here's where the economic impact is being felt most acutely. I hinted at it before, but let's be direct at this point...what it means to build a border wall is shown in crystal clarity: 1 million acres will be in a "no man's land" between the wall and the river. It means our government will essentially use eminent domain to cede land to Mexico. This means that not only is land being taken away from farmers and ranchers along the border, but their access points to the river which is the source of water for their agriculture is being taken away too.

The film interviews landowners - just a small handful of the 3000 people being impacted by this Trump Administration move. The visuals they show you in this part of the film...places where the characters are standing three-quarters of a mile away from the river to demonstrate where the wall will go make it flatly absurd.

Given the folks on screen in this moment, the warped politics of the border wall becomes clear too. How did the Republican Party get so far away from itself that it's taking land from people who would be stable constituents? Isn't protection of property rights one of the central tenets of conservative ideology? Coming from a border community, I already knew this doesn't make much sense, and here we are in the film, immersed in conversation with people who vote for Trump and are severely impacted by this increasingly ludicrous idea.

My conservationist heart was broken to see exploration of a wildlife refuge right along the river that will be bulldozed and cut through to build the wall. Later, after the film, the producer discussed how they had made connections with that particular wildlife refuge and stayed in touch. I was shocked to find out that construction and surveyors are going through these areas, often without even notifying the landowners. This border wall is being built through a waiver of 28 laws that generally guide such a large construction project. They did it under the guise of a "threat" at the border, but I still to this day can't wrap my head around why we have processes we have decided are important elsewhere under eminent domain only sometimes applicable.

This section of the film continues to have powerful moments, one including a choice the characters have to make for fear of their safety going through an area with known drug trafficking at night. It's heart-wrenching to see the two characters with direct immigration stories - Filipe and Austin - process that moment.

Then as with all journeys, they get to the end and arrive at the Gulf of Mexico in between gorgeous sand beaches where people are clearly hanging out and having a good time. And it brings into sharp focus the fact that by creating this wall, and cutting ourselves off...to put it bluntly...from fun. We are choosing to cut ourselves off from this river that gives life and generates economic value and provides recreation for the people who live by it...and we will be the ones who will suffer. The only way I can think to characterize it is a small child having a tantrum in a public place and saying "I don't need you" to their parents...when clearly they need them to do just about everything especially getting home. Except in this case, that tantrum is a permanent building of a fixture - a border wall - that will change the landscape. The next Administration won't be easily able to remove it. This absurdity will go on staining these areas for years and decades.

I will be keeping this movie in the short stack to come back to, and grateful that I saw it. I now have added Big Bend National Park to the list of places I want to visit, and an international peace park down there to the list of things I will support for the rest of my life. So at least there's that?

More reflections on documentaries to come y'all. Stay tuned.

The River and the Wall from Gravitas Ventures on Vimeo.

Films With Impact: MountainFilm 2019

Wed, 29 May 2019 05:11:53 GMT

This is my second year at this amazing film festival, and I have to admit something to you dear reader. I didn't want to talk about it. I knew how transformative this experience was for me last year, anticipated it happening again this year, and I decided before going I was so protective of the community that goes to Mountainfilm and the experience I get to have there that I didn't want to share it with the world. Via social media. Here. Anywhere. Because getting to be in this stunningly beautiful place, seeing films that are made to move me, exploring the caverns of my emotions, and illuminating the power of storytelling...these were all things I didn't want to talk about for fear the stampede might follow. Something like "the first rule of Mountainfilm club is don't talk about it".

I was wrong.

The theme this year was Equity. While the moderator of the opening symposium focused on this topic - Dr Michael Sawyer - was right to say "equity is a way of life, not a theme at a film festival," I found myself in an interesting spot amongst my Mountainfilm friends (family really, but I digress). At first I was explaining the concept of equity compared to equality...essentially verbally stumbling through a description of this diagram that reveals equality as just giving everyone the same regardless of need, compared to equity which gives according to the need:

By the end of the film festival, I was personally so appreciative of the rare opportunity to really explore in depth the concepts of intersectionality and privilege. It's rare as a white woman for this the opportunity to do such a concentrated amount of internal work on myself with such rigor and consistency over the course of a weekend. The organizers of the conference, like me, I think held some fear that my fellow white people who attend the conference would not react well to having their privilege called out and dissected. In the final talk on Monday - aptly named "What Now?" - an attendee of color said their skepticism turned into appreciation and I was grateful and more than a little relieved to hear that perspective from a non-white attendee.

I thought I would keep Mountainfilm to myself, and jealously guard it as a treasure that I get to experience every year among the stunning peaks of Telluride. I believed despite the evidence of very few clicks on this site that by not posting about it...that maybe some others wouldn't hear about it and they wouldn't come. But here's how the equity theme challenged me: it told me I was wrong. That wealth is - yes - my privilege as a white person and my economic income that affords me the chance to get to Telluride and vacation there for the weekend, but it's also the wealth of ideas. That through Mountainfilm I gain immeasurable knowledge and have a responsibility to share that bounty with others. That by benefiting from these stunning films on difficult topics, I should leave and continue this conversation in any and every way possible to honor their beauty and creation.

So I am committing to sharing individual posts on each one of the films as my contribution and my commitment to not be an elitist prick about it. Being elitist was never a good fit for me anyhow. ;)

I pray to be used, to be of use, to be used up for good. Like that quote by George Bernard Shaw "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die." I pray for this every day.
-paraphrased from Oprah Winfrey @Mountainfilm 2019

Each post will be a reflection on the documentary and a focus on the impact and the issue that documentary is raising. There's a lot to unpack with each one, so I'll focus just on one documentary and issue at a time. My goal is to share my authentic take on watching the films as a witness who cares about having an impact. It will not be a review. I'm not here to enumerate flaws. I'm not a filmmaker, nor am I in "the industry". Plus, I didn't get my nickname "sunshine" because I'm critical. I rewatch my favorite movies. Often. #unapologetic

I'm excited to share this journey with you here, and especially to hear your comments and reflections on the documentaries and this experience. I have come down from the mountaintop both literally and figuratively.

Shall we? Let's go!

So You Want To Have An Impact?

Sat, 18 May 2019 23:30:55 GMT

As you can tell by this Enviro(ish) site, I have not blogged in over a year. There’s a lot of reasons for that, excuses really, and one of them is that I’ve always questioned this online realm for impact. Is it slacktivism? Does it translate into impact in real life? Who reads this anyways? You do? Awesome. Thank you for that :)

But more importantly, the Trump era has drastically changed the landscape and re-defined the priorities of progressive causes so dramatically that I’ve been “in the weeds” as it were, trying to figure it out as it changes in real time. And just when I think I’ve seen the landscape enough to paint a picture of it here, it seems to shift. I’ve been taking actions and redefining my theory of change, and I’m ready(ish) to share with you what I think, believe and know. Truthfully, in any conversation about impact, you never really know what you’ve accomplished until the outcome stage. “The proof is in the pudding” so to speak. And so to be perfectly honest with myself and to you, for a long time I have struggled with writing this blogpost because when are you ever done? The answer is never. On this long arc of the moral universe as Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr said, I don't think we ever reach the end. But that's not the point. The point is we work towards bending it every day.

One of my founding principles, though, is never let the perfect be the enemy of the good or eco. So here’s hoping this post helps you in one way or the other.

This idea for a post topic is in recognition of the numerous people asking me “but seriously Megan, how do you know which environmental organizations to give to that have the most impact?” I am definitely going to answer that with a direct response. But first I am going to walkthrough a few priorities on that journey. While it may seem to swerve and wander, I can assure you it’s with necessity and intention. And I hope you end up having the impact you are truly seeking.

1. Believe that you can

This is going to sound hokey, and new age…but honestly the MOST important thing about having an impact is growing your mindset. Let the belief settle within you that *you* *can* make a difference. We live in a world that simultaneously and often negates aspects of our identities, which can undermine our sense of self and especially self worth. And it all comes wrapped in an ever increasing amount of disconnectedness and isolation. I’m not here to disagree with any of those experiences that are genuine barriers to having an impact.

I am here to tell you one simple truth: if you believe you can’t make a difference, then you definitely won’t.

The individual belief that one person can’t make a difference is something we all share. This feeling is universal. This cuts to the core of our own insecurities as people. Every human has this doubt. But therein lies the unlock. If every person had this same doubt, then so did Nelson Mandela, Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Mother Teresa, and Susan B. Anthony. We talk about their legacies as though it was inevitable. But in reading autobiographies of all these folks the theme of self-doubt is deep throughout. Their doubt is the same doubt that we all share, and it is the relief valve towards progress. They were just one person, too. And their progress was not theirs alone. Their progress was thanks to thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of individual actions from people whose names we don’t know and were part of the movements they have come to symbolize. Embrace the possibilities and hold space for awe at what can be accomplished. And I've said before, if you have a case for optimism as the way to solve climate change, you can be optimistic about the change you seek too.

So if you want to have an impact, first, you have to believe you can.

The next four steps are after the jump, after this poem which always inspires me to bring my mindset back into the truth of infinite possibility.

Our Deepest Fear
Marianne Williamson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves,
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us;
It's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

2. BUT REALLY, Know YOUR VALUES

People usually think that they should go to wherever there is the “greatest impact”, as if that is a universally measurable and comparable thing. It is not. To bring home this point, please finish the sentence for yourself:
Greatest impact on _____________
On what?
For what?
For whom?
Why?

How you fill in that blank is more about self-reflection and introspection than some measure that comes externally.

You have to know what motivates you in order to have an impact for two reasons:

Impact is always a relational equation. What is the outcome you are trying to achieve? Seriously stop and ask yourself your ultimate goal. And if you say “good”, well what kind of good? Ask yourself the “why” question at least 3-5 times. I know this will be a challenge for a lot of you, because I have had this conversation too many times to count. For environment, this shows up all the time in the context of life cycle assessment. For example, a common one “paper vs. plastic bag”? Even something that simple requires environmental values or criteria to be applied. Are you trying to minimize your impact on climate change with this choice? Do you care more about ocean pollution and acidity? Do you care more about forest health? People constantly want to push back and say “just, which one is better for the environment?” And we are back where we started: what environmentally do you care about the most? In this case there is an answer - I’m tricksy! Haha. Reusable bag (obviously) so long as you reuse it enough times…it will typically end up overcoming all of the different types of environmental impact….but you get the point, yes? Impact. On. *What*?
The Time Factor. Knowing your values is incredibly important to deciding where you want to focus your effort and energies to have an impact. You won’t have an impact if it doesn’t tie into a key memory, the beat of your heart, or the song of your soul. It’s easy to know why this matters: you won’t stick with it. Longevity and consistency are key to having an impact. Changing things at the outcomes level means you stick with something for a longer period of time. What motivates you over that time horizon is a deeply personal question based upon your own unique experiences. Which is why you will often hear a volunteer or change-maker being featured relating their own personal experience with that issue, or a close friend or family member relating to that issue. For me, it’s a combination of getting chased by elephants in the South African bush, having childhood habits of recycling/turning off lights & water growing up, and pushing through eco-depression to develop a sense of awe and excitement to working on the big, thorny, complicated problems we face as humanity. I am much more able to have an impact on environmental issues at present because I have developed expertise and knowledge on these issues, and I developed into being an expert on environmental issues because I was deeply, personally committed for over 17 years now. See how that works? Ain’t no way around but through it folks.

If you have never done a values identification exercise, I encourage you to do one for yourself. Just you. Nobody else. Like, maybe you actually want to stop reading this right now and figure out your top 5 values so that mine do not sway you from what is at the core inside of you. Take a timeout to discover the forces driving you. Here’s a handy dandy list, if you are like me and abstract thinking stresses you out. If you’d rather process it with “this one or this one?” until you formulaically narrow it down, this list can help! I won’t judge your process. Nor the outcome of this exercise…it is deeply personal, remember? :)

As part of a leadership seminar last October, I identified my top 5 values. What’s more important for me was the process of sharing it in person with a partner during the exercise. Not only did I verbally commit to them, but it also reminded me of the wide range of values that we can each hold. Just because my core values are ones that drive my day-to-day doesn’t mean they are shared by others, and stopping myself from a judgment of someone else’s values was such a strong reminder of how easy it is to judge one another. Here are my five core values:
* Conservation
* Contribution
* Courage
* Empathy
* Freedom/Autonomy

Next up…

3. Define YOUR THEORY OF CHANGE

Once you know you the difference you are trying to make and the outcomes you seek towards the values you carry, the next inevitable step to evaluate is the “how”. Theory of change is the exercise that is often done to try to get to the root of the “how”, and make sure that the actions you are taking actually map onto the outcomes you are seeking. It’s gained as much momentum as it has because of the fact that we are generally pretty terrible at connecting our actions to the outcomes.

So first, you have to define what the outcome is that you want to seek. And I mean really define that outcome in relation to what it is not doing. I care deeply about resolving climate change, about individuals knowing what they can do, and I’ve spent 17 years of my life devoted to these outcomes. I focused on education, changing minds. In the end, although those elements are important, I do not think that is the most impactful way to spend my time. The reality is that with every progressive change, the resistance is strong while it is being passed. And depending upon what it is, the negative viewpoint on that change lasts for a year or five. And then people come around. They do not change their mind and then agree to the more substantial policy change. The policy changes, and they change their mind. And so the outcome I have focused on since November 2016 is this:

Support a strong and powerful environmental movement by giving to and volunteering with environmental grassroots non-profits with a specific focus on resisting bad policies from the current administration, electing eco champions to office to win majorities, and holding those eco champions accountable in office to pass bold pro-environment legislation

Because, you see, when November 2016 happened and I felt indicted by the country I know and love. It didn’t take me long, but within a few weeks I realized that I was not out of step with the majority of Americans. I showed up with 470,000 of them on the Mall in DC January 21 2017. I began taking action with my representatives and resisting online. I was in the majority of Americans who by a 2.8 million popular vote margin, did not elect the current President. I am in the majority of Americans who believe climate change is a threat, gun control is overdue, and women's unequal pay is due to bias. So I asked myself why and how did this happen? The answer I came up with was this: the infrastructure supporting the issues I care about most, that interfaces with elected officials making decisions, had corroded over time. Because people like me had been tending other gardens if we tended any at all.

No more.

Research says to start, a good theory of change should answer six big questions:

Who are you seeking to influence or benefit (target population)?
What benefits are you seeking to achieve (results)?
When will you achieve them (time period)?
How will you and others make this happen (activities, strategies, resources, etc.)?
Where and under what circumstances will you do your work (context)?
Why do you believe your theory will bear out (assumptions)?

Well, how did my theory of change hold up to these six questions?

Who - I am focused on elected officials and policy via environmental non-profits that either sue for bad policy implementation and/or work to elect pro-environmental officials
What - I want pro-environment majorities to achieve a "hold steady" on taking away good environmental law and policy as well as pro-actively get good environmental legislation passed at the local, state and Federal level
When - I'm in it for the long haul. It'll take years to get good measures in place at not just local and state, but Federal levels
How - there are already organizations that do this work, have the scale and infrastructure in their organizations to do even more, and were under-resourced prior to the Trump Administration, especially compared to corporate interests. Environmentally, I am referring to Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and Nature Conservancy.
Where - I will give on a regular/monthly basis to these organizations, fundraise for them and will give my time, talent and effort as it can help them advance the work, particularly with Sierra Club whose model is built upon grassroots people power.
Why - I believe my theory of change will bear out because these are the organizations that protected the Grand Canyon, helped create the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, innovated on economic models and partnerships for conservation to create multiple national parks including Great Sand Dunes National Park. They have done it before and with more help, can do it over and over again.

My theory of change isn't set in stone forever, but it's pretty well developed. I try my best not to trip on the pitfalls of not confusing accountability with hope and assuming I have it all figured out. Even though I've done social impact measurement in the Federal government, non-profit and social entrepreneurship sectors, I have a lot to learn.

But I hope by exploring this topic you now have a framework to think through your own theory. Don't let it get in the way of doing, but do let it be an occasional conversation with yourself to answer that evergreen question: "am I using my time and resources wisely to having the impact I want?"

4. Stay Healthy to Sustain the Fight

The most important thing to take away from this section is that you will spend the most time here. #1, #2 and #3 above are all things that you do relatively on a shorter time basis to set your north star and make sure you have the right map to get you there. #4, this right here....you spend 90% or more of your time just walking the path towards the progress you seek. And did I say walking? I mean SLOGGING.

Trying to have an impact in the real world is a messy business. It takes a long time. There are other people, other organizations, and other ideas to negotiate with. And those are just the ones that are on your same side. Not to forget that bigger than the forces that directly oppose you, is the weight of the status quo. That motherfucker is *heavy*. You will run into people who will say things you think are inappropriate and want to walk away. You will interact with people who will argue with you about the change you seek. You will bump up against organizational forces that don't want your shiny new idea versus what they've always done. You will sometimes lose. Prepare your mind, body and soul for this reality.

For this, I have three pieces of advice:

Keep an Open Mind and Listen. Being good at having an impact will mean negotiating with these forces, and when you are really good at it, it will mean like judo, going with the energy and flow of those forces to achieve an impact. People often think that winning is being stronger when you oppose pound-for-pound the forces that oppose you. It's not. For having an impact, I have found that by yielding to strength, by thinking of the key inflection points of leverage and focusing there, by playing to what advantages you have first, you can win by off-balancing the forces that may be. The surest sign you are utilizing this strategy is you listen to those on your side and those on the opposing side. I mean, really learn how to listen and do it every time, even when it's hard. Keep an open mind. Ask who is not at the table in partnership with you towards the change you seek and should be. And when you do, the journey will be filled less with frustration of "THIS CHANGE IS NEEDED NOW, WHY AREN'T THEY LISTENING", and more actual impact. This is also critical because you will use less energy to have that impact, and therefore stay in the fight longer.
Stop Discounting Rest, Recharge, and Disconnect. There is such a thing as compassion fatigue. And while the term was coined to focus on the very real issue of social workers and those who support our troops and end up having "vicarious traumatization", it is a real issue when trying to have an impact and working or volunteering in the advocacy and non-profit realm. The world is in crisis, the issues aren't getting any easier or often even better at all. There is shame and guilt around stepping away from the issue at any point in time, so you pressurize yourself not to disconnect. Don't. If you experience burnout, you won't have that impact you seek. Build structures to avoid burnout. What that looks like for me is actually a digital detox. Purposefully creating space away from the fast-paced news and information superhighway. I took a vacation last summer to Grand Teton & Yellowstone National Parks and purposefully stayed somewhere with no cell reception or wifi. That first day was an adjustment, but the amount of decompression that came with it...it's something I crave and seek to sustain me. Listen to those needs and nurture them.
Celebrate the Wins. The wins will come. And maybe they will be big, but more often they will be incremental. We forget to take time to celebrate so often. We forget that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, no one heard that sound. And yes, it's like it didn't happen people. I get the inclination. Sometimes, when I've spent so many years on the journey to having that impact, when it finally comes around maybe I feel bruised and beat up. I feel like the path changed 100 times, I am tired, and I'm limping across that line. Rasty is here to say: Celebrate. That. Shit. Celebrate it every time. Providing that positive recognition to what you've accomplished doesn't mean you are done, it means you are marking the occasion for the impact that has been won. And as humans, our brains need this. Plus, did you know that celebrating the small wins actually leads to bigger change and productivity? I KNOW RIGHT?!

5. Never, Ever Stop Pushing Forward

You may change which impact you seek along the way. You will definitely change the way you try to have an impact. You will stumble, you will fail, and you will succeed wildly beyond your expectations. This is all on the journey ahead of you. There is power in knowing that.

Acknowledging what the critics will say - especially that deep inner critic that we all have - is important. It's important to say "I hear you, I see you, and I'm going to show up and do this anyway."

But most importantly, never, ever stop pushing forward. Take a break maybe. Re-engineer certainly. But never stop pushing.

The impact will only come to those who persist.

"I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again."
-Marge Piercy
Quote from What Happened by Hillary Clinton

Are you ready to take that first step? What steps are you already taking? If you made it through this long ass post, please let me know in the comments! :)

Inspirations: Deeds Not Words

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 04:21:17 GMT

It's no secret that I'm a woman (gasp!). And so it shouldn't be surprising that I take a lot of inspiration from the women who fought for 72 years to achieve the 19th amendment which gave me the right to vote. I have been reading about Civil Disobedience and watching Suffragette and Selma and brushing up on the power of non-violent protest. And there's one phrase that sticks with me: Deeds Not Words.

It's used by the suffragettes when they finally give up on changing the system from within and advocating with their impassioned pleas, and changed tactics to take disruptive actions to achieve their aim of Votes for Women. And the concept of "deeds not words" is true, basically a maxim of any theory of social change. If we've learned anything from this election on a universal basis, I hope it's the fruitlessness of posting on Facebook or social media only. It's how we all got our news, but it's a big echo chamber of people who agree with you. Change in the real world cannot be slacktivist, it must be done through grassroots mobilization, through calls, through peaceful protest, through volunteering, through donation.

But I'd like to put this "deeds not words" thing down, flip it and reverse it. I've found myself using this term to evaluate President-elect Donald J. Trump and I think it's a befitting measuring stick we should all use. For the liberals and progressives and Democrats among us, I think it will help us maintain some sanity and steady on the helm. (And not only because we cannot trust his word, since he's been "Pants on Fire", "False" or "Mostly False" 60% of the time out of 334 claims on Politifact....seriously, I can't really fathom living my life where only 15% of what I said was "Mostly True" or "True"....I'm pretty sure I would be unemployable if that were the case)

But more importantly because "deeds not words" put any other way is pretty much how we roll here in the United States of America...

[Read more below the jump]

"Put up or shut up", "Put your money where your mouth is", "Actions speak louder than words". These are all the ways that we handle how to determine what someone really means. How to suss out a master manipulator and b.s. artist. It's the reason why Wall Street evaluates 10Ks much more heavily than press releases. It's the reason why people like my poker-playing brother make prop bets all the time. It's one thing to say something, and it's quite another to put yourself or your interests at risk for your position. Talk *IS* cheap.

People have been speaking lately of the outcome of Donald Trump's on the record statements yesterday to the NY Times which includes a number of "walk back" statements. When it comes to my issues of priority on this blog, Trump's stance on climate change has been severe. As has his choice of lead over the EPA transition as Myron Ebell - a rabid climate change denier and climate science contrarian.

There have been positive stories in the wake of Trump's win on November 8 when it comes to climate change. Not only advocacy from non-profits and using projected art to protest on the EPA building, but also China coming out and baldly stating it is not a hoax and they will take a leadership role, as well as the global business community with many American companies urging Trump to uphold the commitments.

But here's where we have to be extra careful. Here's where "deeds not words" comes into play. President-elect Donald Trump has been covered in the media as softening or walking back his stance, but all he's actually said is he's "open" amidst a lot of typical nonsense that people usually point to in the American Republican party as reasons to not deal with this issue. Read his statements for yourself below (emphasis added by me) and then I'll pick up the key highlights further down:

TRUMP: I’m looking at it very closely, Tom. I’ll tell you what. I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully. It’s one issue that’s interesting because there are few things where there’s more division than climate change. You don’t tend to hear this, but there are people on the other side of that issue who are, think, don’t even …
But a lot of smart people disagree with you. I have a very open mind. And I’m going to study a lot of the things that happened on it and we’re going to look at it very carefully. But I have an open mind.
SULZBERGER: Well, since we’re living on an island, sir, I want to thank you for having an open mind. We saw what these storms are now doing, right? We’ve seen it personally. Straight up.
FRIEDMAN: But you have an open mind on this?
TRUMP: I do have an open mind. And we’ve had storms always, Arthur.
SULZBERGER: Not like this.
TRUMP: You know the hottest day ever was in 1890-something, 98. You know, you can make lots of cases for different views. I have a totally open mind.
My uncle was for 35 years a professor at M.I.T. He was a great engineer, scientist. He was a great guy. And he was … a long time ago, he had feelings — this was a long time ago — he had feelings on this subject. It’s a very complex subject. I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know. I know we have, they say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists. Where was that, in Geneva or wherever five years ago? Terrible. Where they got caught, you know, so you see that and you say, what’s this all about. I absolutely have an open mind. I will tell you this: Clean air is vitally important. Clean water, crystal clean water is vitally important. Safety is vitally important.
And you know, you mentioned a lot of the courses. I have some great, great, very successful golf courses. I’ve received so many environmental awards for the way I’ve done, you know. I’ve done a tremendous amount of work where I’ve received tremendous numbers. Sometimes I’ll say I’m actually an environmentalist and people will smile in some cases and other people that know me understand that’s true. Open mind.
JAMES BENNET, editorial page editor: When you say an open mind, you mean you’re just not sure whether human activity causes climate change? Do you think human activity is or isn’t connected?
TRUMP: I think right now … well, I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies. You have to understand, our companies are noncompetitive right now.
They’re really largely noncompetitive. About four weeks ago, I started adding a certain little sentence into a lot of my speeches, that we’ve lost 70,000 factories since W. Bush. 70,000. When I first looked at the number, I said: ‘That must be a typo. It can’t be 70, you can’t have 70,000, you wouldn’t think you have 70,000 factories here.’ And it wasn’t a typo, it’s right. We’ve lost 70,000 factories.
We’re not a competitive nation with other nations anymore. We have to make ourselves competitive. We’re not competitive for a lot of reasons.
That’s becoming more and more of the reason. Because a lot of these countries that we do business with, they make deals with our president, or whoever, and then they don’t adhere to the deals, you know that. And it’s much less expensive for their companies to produce products. So I’m going to be studying that very hard, and I think I have a very big voice in it. And I think my voice is listened to, especially by people that don’t believe in it. And we’ll let you know.

So to summarize some of the key points of his statements:

He's referencing "division" on climate change and "not sure we're ever going to really know" when the facts are that 97% or more of actively publishing climate scientists are in agreement.
He's saying a "lot of smart people" disagree, which is solely due to a "anything-but-scientific survey" from an oil/gas funded fake non-profit funded by the Koch Brothers that had thousands of scientists sign on, when in reality only 77 people who signed had more than half their papers published in a scientific journal of their peers. Aka, a lot of non-climate-scientists and random people that we shouldn't consider experts.
He's trying to normalize the fact that we've always had storms which is kind of like how a Senator went onto the floor and held up a snowball to say global warming was a "hysteria" because it's cold outside (must see: my favorite tweet ever on this). There's proof that climate change is making weather patterns "on steroids", aka more extreme and frequent.
He's pointing to the hottest temperature recorded in Death Valley to avoid talking about 2016 as on lock the hottest year on record and the 16 hottest years all since 2000, with the top four since 2010.
He closes out with the most non-committal "I'll let you know".

Do not be complacent in the face of a serial liar that exhibits authoritarian and fascist elements of his leadership style. The research on how to survive an autocrat is simple:
#1 - Believe the autocrat
#2 - Do not be taken in by small signs of normality
#3 - Institutions will not save you
#4 - Be outraged
#5 - Do not make compromises
#6 - Remember the future.

The best way to remember #1 and #2 in my book is the simple: DEEDS NOT WORDS mantra. The media who is looking for ways to soften their stance so they can maintain access to a Trump administration may have covered his statement on climate as "walking it back". But as shown above, he did not. He did nothing that would commit himself to serious consideration of this issue, and gave himself many, many "outs" for how to maintain his current position.

When we look at what he's done, his position is clear. The climate change denier to lead at EPA, the oil executive to lead transition at Dept of Interior, the lead at NASA is going to cut funding to their Earth science research division.

Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.

Look for deeds, not words.

And when it comes to resisting and fighting these forces, deploy that yourself. Deeds not words. Take action and don't be a slacktivist. That did not turn out so well for us on 11/9.

If you are like me, the positions we have taken lead people to a lot of misunderstanding. They distance themselves. They mislabel. I've been called hateful and mean. I've been cursed at. All since the election. It can be a lonely experience to go through. I feel sometimes like I am out on a limb. But I go through the exercise of reminding myself that I am not alone. We are not alone. We are stronger together. There are millions with us in the abstract. And up close and personally, there are people in my life who are there with me. We have to find our tribe of people who will support and sustain us through the sometimes difficult other interactions.

Stay inspired on the journey of "deeds not words", and if you need a dose of inspiration, here's one of my favorites from the movie Suffragette. #6 - remember the future. Always.

Lead on.

The woman wanderer goes forth to seek the land of freedom. "How am I to get there?"

Reason answers, "There is one way and one way only. Down the banks of labor, through the waters of suffering, there is no other."

The woman, having discarded all to which she had formerly clung, cries out "For what do I go to this land which no one has ever reached? I am alone, I am utterly alone."

And Reason, said to her, "Silence. What do you hear?"

And she said, "I hear the sound of feet. A thousand times, ten thousands and thousands of thousands and they beat this way."

"They are the feet of those that shall follow you. Lead on."

-From Dreams as seen in the movie Suffragette

Links I (Don't) Love: Trump Is Not a Christian Edition

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 07:11:25 GMT

As part of engaging in a dialogue in the wake of Trump being elected, I've written up a compilation of where Donald Trump has broken the Ten Commandments to engage with my fellow Catholics. Shared here in case others find it useful. Take care of each other out there. And if you are in the trenches, just know that I am right there with you.

#1 - I, the Lord, am your God. You shall not have other gods besides me
How can you be a Christian if you never go to church? (he also broke #8 on this one)
"Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told reporters Thursday that he attends a church in Manhattan, but the church released a statement saying the real estate developer is not an "active member." http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/28/politics/donald-trump-church-member/

Also, what kind of Christian doesn't believe in the need for redemption and forgiveness from the Savior....what kind of Christian doesn't bring God into the picture of forgiveness?
"I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don't think so," he said. "I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don't bring God into that picture. I don't."
Trump said that while he hasn't asked God for forgiveness, he does participate in Holy Communion.
"When I drink my little wine -- which is about the only wine I drink -- and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed," he said. "I think in terms of 'let's go on and let's make it right.'" http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/18/politics/trump-has-never-sought-forgiveness/

#2 - You shall not take the name of the Lord God in vain
Well, this one is easy thanks to the interwebs...you can see him say it himself...
[Read more below the jump]

#3 - Remember to keep holy the Lord's Day
See #1 for the Church he said he attended saying he's not an active member. Also, there's the eyewitness who remember the era of when the Trumps went to Church:
"Christina Ferro, 96, is the oldest member of First Presbyterian Church, and one of the only people around who still remembers the Trumps. She and her daughter, Holly Hladun, are also among the few white people who attend. Although things have changed a lot, “it’s always been good,”.....
Ferro joined the church as a young woman in 1945, one year before little Donald was born. At the time, that area in Queens was dominated by Western European immigrants—including people like Trump’s mother, Mary, who came to the United States from Scotland in 1929. Ferro taught young kids in Sunday School, but says she never had the middle Trump boy; her now-dead husband, Jim, taught Donald when he was a teen, according to her daughter, Holly Hladun.
“He was one of the boys I just never went anywhere near, because he scared the crap out of me,” said Hladun, who is a few years younger than Trump. “There was just something about him.”
According to Ferro, the Trumps sat up in the balcony on the righthand side of the sanctuary; many families at First Church, as in other congregations, have a particular section where they like to sit."
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/trumps-sunday-school/492653/

#4 - Honor your father and mother
Donald Trump took the opportunity to make a self-centered joke in his father's obituary:
In fact, every aggressive word Donald Trump ever directed at his father seems to have been about business. When Fred died, Donald Trump gave a cheerful quote for his father’s New York Times obituary, focusing on the way his dad had never wanted to expand into Manhattan. “It was good for me,” he said. “You know, being the son of somebody, it could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to myself!” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/26/donald-trump-fred-trump-father-relationship-business-real-estate-art-of-deal

#5 - You shall not kill
Donald Trump advocated for a war crime - killing civilian families of suspected terrorists
"Donald Trump says the United States should kill the family members of terrorists, and not to do so is just being "politically correct."
"The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families," Trump said on Fox and Friends on Dec. 2, 2015. "They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/17/rand-paul/rand-pauls-right-geneva-conventions-bar-donald-tru/

Also, I find it deeply troubling that the example by which he talks about his supporters loyalty is "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and they would still support me". Not a very Christian example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMmiLWDpCno

#6 - You shall not commit adultery
He had a very public extra-marital affair with Marla Maples (cheating on Ivana)and actually gave birth to his daughter Tiffany by his second wife out of wedlock:
After meeting Marla at a tennis tournament, he started flirting with her at a Manhattan church, Marble Collegiate. That’s where he eventually married her, the great passion that blew up his family, but he waited for two years after his divorce, and even for two months after she gave birth to their daughter. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/donald-trump-history-women-adultery-objectification-article-1.2604073

...and then he created a fake PR person which was really him to brag to the media about his sleeping around on Marla Maples (you can listen to the tape yourself)
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-files-listen-donald-brag-about-his-affairs-while-pretending-be-someone-else

and then there's the fact that he said adultery is not a sin during this period:
“Do you think adultery is a sin?” Trump was asked in the February issue.
“Very good question,” he responded. According to the report at the time, Trump paused and then said:
“I don’t think it’s a sin but I don’t think it should be done.”
The reporters pressed: “Would you do it?” After which, Trump coyly responded “I’ll let you guess.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/30/donald-trump-in-1990-adultery-is-not-a-sin.html

#7 - You shall not steal
He stole from his non-profit to pay his legal fees:
Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-used-258000-from-his-charity-to-settle-legal-problems/2016/09/20/adc88f9c-7d11-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html

More importantly, he stole from hundreds of regular Americans who he contracted with and then refused to pay them and threatened to sue in order to pay less than the cost of the products and services:
"At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.
Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/

Via testimonial of one of his victims who Trump didn't pay $30,000 on a $100,000 bill and almost lost everything (had 5 kids, family business):

#8 - You shall not bear false witness
Inventing a near-death experience in which three of his executives lost their lives: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/07/donald-trump-files-helicopter-crash
Lied about giving to charity: https://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/fact-checking-donald-trumps-charity-claims
He is "Pants on Fire", "False" or "Mostly False" 70% of the time out of 334 assessed statements:
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/

#9 - You shall not covet your neighbor's wife
The woman who he refers to in the tape below right away (from the "Trump Tape" with his really indecent "grab them by the pussy" comment) is his neighbor and is married. There's more if you "want" to watch the whole video of how he demeans and insults women.
"I moved on her and I failed. I did try to fuck her. She was married....and I moved on her very heavily in fact I took her furniture shopping....I moved on her like a bitch but couldn't get there. And she was married."

#10 You shall not covet your neighbor's goods
Too easy!
"What is the worst example of shameless materialism that you have ever seen?" Donald Trump
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4p3kim/what_is_the_worst_example_of_shameless/

But seriously: http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/donald-trumps-extravagant-gold-rimmed-nyc-penthouse-is-amazing-pics-20151111

Also:
“Now, I’ll tell you, I’m good at that – so, you know, I’ve always taken in money,” he said at a rally in Iowa. “I like money. I’m very greedy. I’m a greedy person. I shouldn’t tell you that, I’m a greedy – I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right?"
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/265335-trump-im-very-greedy

EcoPartyDownload: WHAT JUST HAPPENED and What Do We Do Now

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 03:09:51 GMT

My darlings. My dear small handful of readers. Even among you there is a diversity of thoughts and voting in this election. I don't want to turn you away. I want us to stay together and not break up. Because dialogue and openness is the most important thing everybody needs right now. Along with goodness, and you all are people I value so much.

I have to cheat on you though, and I want to tell you why. 11/9 changed me from who I was when I started this blog. I began this journey as encouraging you to be environmentalish and allowed myself and us all to believe that was the pathway to progress. Do one thing. Make it a habit. Rinse, repeat. That the drumbeat of progress on environment and climate would be steady at the national level - we had just made AMAZING gains - and you and I together just had to make small changes to our dailies to get there. I was wrong. I was heartbreakingly and painfully wrong. In the wake of President Trump winning people have accused me of hubris, of thinking I'm "better than", of not listening. They have said I only care about what happened in this election because my job depends on it. They have laughed in victory at my Facebook posts of the grief cycle I'm going through after pouring myself into 15 years of environmental work. They have attacked me personally for decrying the hate crime spike after this election. They have called me a racist for defending minorities against that hate (no really, I quote: "the definition of a bigot").

I may have been wrong about this election, but those people? They've got me all wrong. Most of you know me in real life, so I know you might think this doesn't need to be said, but as a woman and an environmentalist, America just indicted me. Slapped me upside the head and spit on me. Some of my fellow citizens just tumbled me to the bottom of Mt Everest with no oxygen and bricks in my backpack. I'm gonna need to take a moment to assess my scrapes and bumps and bruises (done, check). And now I need a minute of affirmation before I get back to climbing (spoiler alert: I WILL NEVER STOP CLIMBING).

Who am I then? I am an optimist. I am hopeful. I believe in the importance of active listening, of going deeper than soundbites. I look for the inspirational. I love to laugh about things that should make us all weep (not kidding). When I think about what I do every day when I get up and go to work, I think about whether I'm having an impact. Whether I'm making a difference. I worked hard to learn my craft. I practice what I preach. I am a builder. I am a Catholic. I reach across the aisle. And those people who want to bring me down? Haters gonna hate. Says a whole lot more about them than me. And besides, I've long ago decide to be myself anyway. And sounds like I'm in good company....PREACH AMBER, PREACH!
[Read more after the break]

"But then you realize that by doing what you do every day you prove to them that you are unstoppable...all you have to do is live your lives right in their faces. And it proves we simply cannot be stopped."

I passed through the denial phase of my grief pretty quickly. And here's why that's important. We all need to look at President-elect Donald Trump for exactly who he is. For exactly what he's going to do. We take him at his word. Unvarnished, unpleasant, and grotesque as that is. We scoffed and got complacent because President Obama was dealing with this issue that 64% of Americans find very or fairly worrying, an 8 year high of public opinion. No more. We stare it down. Right in the face. No more ignoring the climate denialists, those fucking weasels. We root out this cancerous poison that is choking us all on spaceship Earth. We do not concede or give ground. We fight the war on facts on this most pressing of issues.

On climate, MAGA’s position is ugly. It's fucking ugly. It's BIGLY FUGLY:

There’s no way around it: What he’s planning to do looks like an absolute disaster for the planet (and the people on it)
Trump's tweets on climate over the years range from the stupid to the circumstantial to the conspiracy: the name change to climate change from global warming shows it doesn't work, the temperature is freezing and so "we need GLOBAL WARMING", the people working on it are frauds and cons, it's bullshit and it's a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Seriously, read them. Read them all. Get horrified by them, we will all need to be outraged going forward.
The person leading his transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency is a rabid climate change denier who enjoys being a contrarian on the science.
The person leading his transition team for the Department of the Interior which oversees national parks and wildlife refuges, along with decisions about offshore drilling, fracking regulations and protections for endangered species is an oil executive. Or dare to dream, there's a rumor or "drill baby, drill" Sarah Palin too.
His platform on environmental issues was non-existent, with no specific policies.
Trump has also hinted he wants to downsize the EPA. “What they do is a disgrace,” he has said. He now has the power to rewrite or scale back other regulations on mercury pollution, on ground-level ozone, on coal ash, and more.
Trump has said he wants to repeal all federal spending on clean energy, including R&D for wind, solar, nuclear power, and electric vehicles. This would require Congress, but it’s not impossible.
He is looking at ways to "quick withdraw" from the four year process of the Paris Agreement that went into force November 4th and has over 100 nations representing 76% of global emissions (the U.S. is 18%).

Have the picture in your head of this coming disaster? We cannot afford to slide back even an inch. Our livelihoods and well-being on this planet cannot take further delay. So if it's not seeped into your bones yet, if you want to live in denial of Trumpland eco-edition, re-read the above until you are sufficiently horrified. Do not set up camp in denial land, we need you.

OK. Now what do we do?

We decide to be angelic troublemakers. BIGLY STYLE. We have the first amendment protection to freedom of expression and protest and we must use it. Telling ourselves that his extremist rhetoric will die down now that he's in office is lying to ourselves. That's what the moderate Germans said about Herr Hitler in 1922. SERIOUSLY I AM NOT KIDDING.

Donald Trump is so tone deaf to his trampling of American citizen's rights and freedoms in this election that he needs to be resisted. At every turn. This is the guy who appointed an alt-right, white nationalist who had charges for domestic violence to be the chief strategist in the White House. He's ignoring criticism over this choice from both sides of the aisle. WTF.

There is no chance he will back down on climate, or give into common sense, not when so many of his supporters don't think the science is real. Not when we have other things to decry like people's fear over being deported, the rash of hate crime, the attempted breakup of LGBT families.

So we must begin the resistance. We must be the change we want to see in the world. We must resist this injustice at ever turn. Mockingjay style.

I want you to know that I'm alive. That I'm in an America that is shredding our values with hate speech and burning the rights of minority citizens at the hands of the tyrannical majority.

If you think for one second that the capitol under Trump and his cronies will ever treat us fairly, you are lying to yourselves. Because we know who they are and what they do. THIS is what they do. And we must fight back.

I have a message for President-elect Trump. You can demean us, and grope us, and unleash the most indecent hate on us. But do you see that? Fire is catching, and if we burn, you....WILL FIGHT US FOR EVERY INCH.

I know....I went all Katniss Everdeen on you! And you thought that Hunger Games could only be a tool to explain the Trump supporters. You thought that liberal coastal elites could never be the revolutionaries with the homespun values like Katniss. We're just a bunch of bleeding hearts who give up and roll over. Wrong!

But here's some comfort for you. For us all. For the Republicans and conservatives and independents who voted for Trump and are surprised by this outpouring of expression and protest, and for the Democrats and liberals and progressives who are clinically depressed, alarmed, and rallying to the cause: our republic has faced this before. The tyranny of the majority was used to uphold slavery for decades after our revolutionary formation. We overturned it not because a majority of the white male landholders (aka Americans who could vote) came into common sense. We overturned it because a small minority of abolitionists demanded justice and sacrificed and rooted out this moral cancer. I've been enjoying re-reading Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, written in 1849 in the pre-Civil War era and extremely relevant to today (pls ignore the gendered pronouns and never forget...ladies didn't get the vote until 1920. #imstillwithher #suffragettewhite #strongertogether #pantsuitnationforlife)

Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. IT makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage it's citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as the higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.

As for me, my journey has already begun. I can never go back, and I cannot surrender to the fate of a Trump administration for the future of ourselves on this planet. I am a patriot. And so I participate, I show up, I rally, I protest, I express, I call, I chant, I donate, I fight. I know that I am luckier than most. I am blessed with a life of great opportunity that has given me privileges not everyone enjoys. The public good is threatened. Climate change is real, and HUUUGGE and scary. I am staring at the summit from the bottom of this unnecessary Mt Everest to climb to protect ourselves and our planet, to preserve clean water and clean air and our futures. I'm already climbing.

Let's do this thing.

EcoPartyDownload: Corporate Sustainability, Net Positive, and Where Enviros get it Not Quite Right

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 07:00:00 GMT

I finally figured out the stats of my blog site and turns out I have more than one reader. Huzzah! The most interest was my recent EcoPartyDownload...so here's to listening and continuing that conversation. These type of posts take me a lot more time, but is it worth it? Give the people what they want? You tell me!

I had to update the "Meet Megan" section of this blog recently and realized I've been doing environmental work for almost 15 years. Shoot. Time flies. But then again, in such a fast-moving and constantly evolving profession as sustainability has turned out to be, that feels like light years ago. Particularly when thinking about the future I see for how corporate sustainability is shifting. And in this regard, the environmental movement and its theory of change going back decades has not yet embraced what I believe to be the greatest opportunity for corporate America to "step up". But before I can get to advocating for what I think is the answer, we have to get on the same page, and that involves dipping into how we all got here (I'll make it quick! Like ripping off a band-aid). But I really do have to give you the skinny on why the environmentalists got to their belief system on what causes corporations to reduce their impact on the planet. They have a really good reason for being that way.

In the days of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the blue marble photo of Earth that sparked the environmental movement, there wasn't a political lens to it. I mean, consider: who doesn't benefit or get impacted by waterways, drinking water and air clean of pollution? Passage of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were strongly supported on a bipartisan basis by Congress (I know...feels like a fairy tale to say that these days!). And then....came the reaction. The backlash. President Reagan's underlying principle of "economy vs environment" meant appointing a blatantly anti-environmentalist to lead the EPA and ripping out the solar water heating system installed by President Carter. Which all led to the formalization and codification of environmental issues being deeply partisan with the GOP being "anti" for all things environmental, and that divide has stayed the rule pretty much to this day. With the notable and extremely temporary exception of when climate had it's moment in 2007 where conservatives supported taking action until they collapsed into this still toxic and resistant strain of denialism. Deep roots that denialism has. Sigh. Anyways, that concrete-like hardening on the political front was a result of multinational corporations deciding that environmental regulation was onerous, expensive and corporates came in heavy to all levels of government against any further action.

So how did this play out outside of the Beltway? How were companies interacting on environmental issues in their business during the 80s and 90s before corporate sustainability became "a thing"?
(Read on below the jump)

As you can probably surmise, businesses were not addressing these issues well. You have the Exxon Valdez oil spill happening in 1989 with 11 million gallons spilling without any real emergency containment measures to stop it from killing off massive amounts of wildlife and flora. And in the broadest possible economic context, you have the explosive growth of multi-national corporations (from 7,000 in 1970 to over 38,000 by 2000). These companies had more assets than most countries and that form of power was expressed environmentally with operations spanning the globe that chose locations where it cheaper to operate. The "worst environmental disaster in history" happened at Bhopal, India, in 1984 where 30 tons of poisonous pesticide killed thousands and impacted the health of tens of thousands to this day. In 1990 an environmental non-violent protest began in Nigeria against Shell led by Ken Saro-Wiwa on behalf of the Movement of the Survival of the Ogoni People because of the severe degradation to their land and human rights abuses.    Ken Saro-Wiwa was sentenced to death in 1995 after a military tribunal in what is widely known as a silencing by a corrupt government.

These incidents are HEAVY and gross wrongs. And so in order to understand the environmental movement...you have to understand that this is what they were up against. Powers inside the U.S. government that were determined to dismantle the few protections that had gone into place while companies actions and inactions were literally killing people with a complete lack of environmental practices and human rights abuses.

So in that frame, it's not hard to see why and how activist oriented environmental non-profits sprang up. Law students started a non-profit dedicated to litigating on actions to protect the planet and so the Natural Resources Defense Council came to be during this period. Greenpeace formed in the 70s and so by 1995 it wasn't that surprising when protesters occupied corporate real estate on the Brent Spar oil storage station in the North Sea.   And activist campaigns have led to changes. Notably there's the worker's rights campaigns in the 90s that seared these corporations into becoming leaders in the sustainability field: Gap Inc. which is now a showcase for how to engage stakeholders, and Nike who by any measure transformed their culture to lead in ethical practices, most notably evident by their commingling of sustainability & innovation. And most recently, Greenpeace's campaigns in Indonesia and Malaysia struggled to get wider traction with consumer behavior change until they pivoted to a supply chain campaign of downstream brands using paper/pulp from notable "deforester baddie" Asia Paper & Pulp (APP). A few protests against Disney and Mattel and within a year over 100 multinational companies had banned APP material in their supply chain, which ultimately led to doing their right thing, with measurable results.

This is all to say, I get it, and hopefully you do too. It's not hard to see why environmentalists picked their approach when it came to corporates. Name shaming is a tried and true practice that can lead to change beyond the one company when deployed well, particularly for the "bad actors" and making sure the low bar gets raised up (key word there being "can").

And to be fair, this portrayal missed out on the environmental NGOs that have clearly led with partnership, aka "the carrot" instead of "the stick". Some NGOs have made it their mission to work with corporations since the "how" to execute change can be just as critical to reducing environmental impact as the "why". Chief among them is Environmental Defense Fund, who partnered with McDonalds to get rid of their styrofoam containers and are the originators (and instigators?) of Walmart's ambitious sustainability goals. Walmart's President at the time - Lee Scott - gave his now famous 21st Century Leadership speech in 2005 in what is widely recognized as the "launch party" for corporate sustainability (and full disclosure of my bias, I was an EDF Climate Corps Fellow who now works on these issues inside corporates...so its safe to say I like their style)

Since then, sustainability as a profession has expanded even during the Great Recession to include many corporates, and sometimes in extraordinarily revenue-generating and strategic ways. Social enterprises have proliferated and flourished - with or without their B Corp certification - such as Ben & Jerry's, Method/Ecover...and we now have Unilever pointing to their sustainable products portfolio as growing 30% faster than the rest of their product lines. We've had brands connected at the core to the outdoors giving us spectacularly successful campaigns like "Don't Buy This Jacket" (Patagonia) and "#OptOutside" (REI) as a counterpoint to the consumerist bonanza of Black Friday. And a little company called GE which has not only launched their Ecomagination campaign with ambitious corporate sustainability goals, but their own business division dedicated to renewable energy that was the lone brightspot during their quarterly earnings earlier this year.   Wow. We're talking about a company the size of a medium sized country's economy now on the side fighting to advance and advocate for renewable energy and climate change governmental action.

And yet.

The corporate sustainability conversation is still pretty much mired in the frame of "do less harm". Shrink your carbon footprint, zero waste. The inevitable conclusion of this environmental philosophy is to do nothing, that the outside NGO community is pushing in essence for the company to not exist. It's a pretty difficult message to really get an executive engaged. I like to think of this overriding mindset as "the greenest way to be is to not make/exist/do anything, ever". And here's the thing. I started this blog precisely because I don't subscribe fully to that philosophy and to the associated shaming that always accompanies it. We have to be mindful of our impact, yes, absolutely. But just because there's an impact doesn't mean it should never be done. I am an environmentalist who encourages you to be environmentalish because following that logic to end of the line doesn't make sense, we all don't have to live in a potato sack off the grid and never go anywhere in order for our livelihoods and the planet to be sustainable.

To make the conversation concrete, here's a shining example of the problems with this anti-corporate environmental stance. In recent years, environmentalists in San Francisco successfully fought zoning rules and are so fervently anti-development that new buildings have not been approved to keep up with demand. Environmentally, this is in spite of the realities that urban densification of an exploding local population into new and efficient buildings would be the best thing for the planet.

It's not hard to see why the framework that environmental non-profits started with in the 70s and the issues they faced from corporates in the 80s and 90s need a long, hard, fresh look.   So now IMHO you're ready my friend. We've arrived at giving you the enviro(ish) answer (don't be disappointed by how simple it is!):

The conversation has been so focused on the environmental impact - the cost - that we've plumb forgot to have the benefits side as part of it too. We've been missing part of the equation this whole entire time. In financial terms we discuss profit as revenue minus cost. It's not just cost. Duh. When deciding if an action is worth the effort, we need to have a bigger frame for deciding whether it has value. Instead of saying "there's a cost never do it", we should be saying to ourselves "does the benefit outweigh the cost? is it a good value?"

How does this translate into corporate sustainability? Not quite yet but thankfully it's already starting to. It's just not widespread yet (that's where you come in..spread the good word my people!) There's a growing movement for Net Positive, meaning does the company replenish the resources it uses and create a positive impact on society and the planet. To use the metaphorical language of the space, is the "handprint" of positive impact bigger than the "footprint".   In other words, do the benefits outweigh the cost?

Here's the thing I can tell you that this conversation unlocks....AMAZING possibilities. So much more is on the table in this conversation, and more options mean that corporations can find the most impactful ways to activate in the ways that have value to the business too. In energy and carbon the conversation opens up not just to investments and offsets for renewable energy, but even more interestingly, to the carbon reductions enabled by the company's product or service. When it's used by customers, do their footprints shrink too? (Full disclosure of my bias, there's proof in the mobile technology space that it does...enables 10x the reduction!) Sometimes this net positive impact can be beneficial to the direct bottom line...I love the Coca-Cola example of water replenishment (first in the Fortune 500 to achieve 1-for-1 replacement of water used). When your product needs at its most central the use water, efficiency can only take you so far. So full replenishment achieved is awesome by any measure, and in this case, is not just net positive (yay) but helps ensure their operations can stay in the existing locations and watersheds by sustaining the water available locally.

My theory is this: some companies have adopted sustainability whole-heartedly and some have not. Most are in the vast middle struggling to "make it work people." So why don't environmental NGOs and all stakeholders make the conversation easier? Instead of always hitting corporate with "the stick" inducing fear and shame and walls...why don't they ask corporates whether they are having more benefits than they are costing the planet? Tapping into the similarity of the profit equation means leveraging the language corporates speak already, all the time (hello quarterly reports to the street). Let's use it. What if we stopped treating the conversation as adversarial (aka "swimming upstream" or "against the tide"...pick your metaphor) and instead engaged in this much more interesting conversation that started embracing the strength of markets and corporates to leverage their collective power.

So have I convinced you on the power of Net Positive? You're now an EXPERT on the next wave of corporate sustainability while it's still way off on the horizon...but you can see this awesome set coming in now yeah? :) Take this knowledge with you into your day-to-day whether at work, play or home!

And don't forget to leave a comment and let me know...should I keep doing posts like this? I'm just so glad you're still reading this and want to make sure I deliver on what you want.

Links I Love: Kaepernick Inspired Protests

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 14:33:27 GMT

I'm always so much more of a visual learner. And thankfully in corporate America we're in a world of PowerPoint decks which lends itself well to my existing preference (shoutout to my people with different abilities though...sorry friends I'm sure it's hard to adapt!)

Anyways, I have finally been trying to get my Twitter on for these posts so that I could have more than you, my dear singular reader. So I've written a couple on the post that was most difficult and scary for me...The Act of Listening, Especially When It's Hard...in which I steeped myself in the ways I could in the black experience to extend my support of Black Lives Matter to the Kaepernick peaceful protests through understanding...especially in light of him being the most disliked player in the league and death threats. Holy cannoli that's aggressive of us America! It's called exercising his Constitutional right to freedom of expression...take a deep breath and chiiillllllllll. Anyways, my decision to purposefully increase exposure and understanding worked pretty well in terms of increasing my empathy. And so far the interwebs hasn't pilloried me for trying to engage in a race conversation as a white person (thank you for that, my dear singular reader!)

Saw this graphic from Think Progress and just love everything about what it says. Americans standing up together with Kaepernick in solidarity of his peaceful protest. I think it gives new and deeper meaning to the phrase "When the Game Stands Tall".

http://think-progress.tumblr.com/post/150687006019/the-kaepernick-effect-tracking-the-spread-of

Inspirations: The Basic Trust Principle & Believing in Growth

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 14:52:34 GMT

I was very scattershot about podcast listening, but have recently discovered them while traveling (no eyestrain during turbulence!) which means with my work travel I'm becoming a regular. Have a long car ride to Palm Springs? Finally caught up on the entirety of Serial season 1. So over this past weekend, I went through a number of the TED Radio Hour podcasts, and this one about Crisis & Response had a great mention of something I had never heard before. One of the segments is about a man who lost all of his money in the Madoff ponzi scheme. He spoke about how he finally connected with others who lost everything who had decided to think about it differently....they had embraced with gratitude that the experience had made them more connected to others than ever before. He ultimately learns as well to overcome the blaming and shaming of the experience, determining that just because he lost all of his money to Madoff, he didn't want to surrender who he was as a person as well.

When pivoting towards advice for others to "prepare", he says two things which I agree with whole-heartedly:

Know that you will have a crisis in your life. That the concept of living a charmed life free of crises is not possible for anyone, so that when something does take place that unbalances you, you only experience the shock of what your are actually losing or dealing with...not the amplified shock of "I can't believe something like this could ever happen to me". Ummm...YES.
He quotes a principle called basic trust, which I had not heard of before and am already 200% in support of:

(Read more after the jump)

"...what it says is you believe that whatever happens in your life is exactly what needs to happen to make you the person you need to become. It means that whatever happens to you, you can grow from it, you can learn from it, you can get stronger from it. And if you take this idea that you can grow through adversity, and not just through adversity, certainly what's going to happen to me is that I'm not going to be the same a couple years from now as I am now. Most people, the way they make the biggest changes is when life pushes back."
-Matt Weinstein, "What Lessons Can We Learn from Losing our Life's Savings?", TED Radio Hour

I've experienced a lot of tumbles the last few years, both personal and professional, and this right here is the best advice I've ever heard, and the advice that made a big "unlock" for me. I spent so much time fighting the changes that were happening to me. Internally I thought that I could ignore life giving me pushback...that I could redirect it, rise to the challenge, overcome, etc. But sometimes when you're getting pushed around and kicked down, you have to take a step back and realize that insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different outcome. I had to learn the hard way that the change that needed to happen was within me. I had to get knocked down, dragged out to realize that I had become the problem, my unwillingness to look and think differently. But what has been so amazing and wonderful is that when I finally did embrace the change, when I finally went with the current and let it take me where it needed me to go instead of banging my head against the rocks....that a whole new world of experiences and warmth and love were waiting for me. Spot on, Matt Weinstein. Spot on my friend.

So the basic trust principle is actually from a psychologist named Erik Erikson who was a contemporary of Freud, but instead of going for the sexual phases of development, oriented his stages to social (aka psychosocial stages of development). I'm going to spend a LOT more time with this theory because I think it's really onto something (rather, I've finally grown enough personally to see that it was onto something before I'd ever heard of it....haha. You get the idea!)

Since I like to end with fun and keep it light, kind of enjoyed this look at Erikson's eight stages of development through the lens of Pixar films. Nice work interwebs!

Update: Standing Rock Sioux Progress Towards Justice

Sat, 24 Sep 2016 20:51:33 GMT

What a difference 3 weeks makes! Since I first blogged about the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Native American protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the situation looked bleak. I mean really horrifying with protesters bitten by security dogs drawing blood and attacked by pepper spray awful. But since then the movement has netted real results. And I hope this march towards justice achieves its aim.

Most recent, 1,200 archaeologists wrote a letter to President Obama condemning the damage to our cultural heritage of one of the most significant sites in North Dakota that the Pipeline LLC company did by bulldozing Tribal burial grounds. This is the incident that led to the above atrocities...and the fact that the Dakota Pipeline company did it without permission from the Army Corps of Engineers and ONE DAY AFTER the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed the location of these sacred sites makes them as I've opined before: corporate psychopaths. So huzzah for the experts agreeing.

Most importantly, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has received an even greater step/win with an official halt on pipeline construction order from a Federal Appeals court, which is significant because the Obama Administration letter was only a request in support of a stoppage. Not to mention the protest at the White House over this issue (raised profile is a good thing for justice!) or the consultations with the administration.

Having read a lot of Brene Brown lately, I am beginning to understand the power of shame to prevent conversations that desperately need to happen. As a white person, I believe it's important to recognize the impediment fear of shame brings to this conversation and acknowledge this history so we can start to do right. This video handles the subject with humor (which I always appreciate). Worth a watch...what did you think?

Links I Love: Climate Week NYC

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 14:46:49 GMT

I used to think the world was so organized. Blame it on the media I grew up with - a book, a movie, a television show. Everything seemed so neatly organized into distinct units with a beginning, middle and end. So I've become increasingly interested in gatherings that defy my own limitation. Climate Week NYC is one of those weeks. It has become a week on the calendar where strategic, global thinkers on climate from government, private sector, universities...anywhere...swarm the city and all kinds of micro and macro announcements are made. More importantly, all kinds of connections are made between those with funding to those with the big ideas that are going to solve this thing.

And almost in perfect PR unity, the Empire State Building, eco-famous for it's own massive environmental retrofit, now has LED lights (eco-perfect!) which can mark the occasion.

Excited to see what comes out of this Climate Week 2016! Take a look at the 3 minute overview video on the organizing group. FWIW...pretty proud I'm one of the 100,000 EVs driving on the road in the U.S. "Everything we do locally will have an impact globally"...pretty slick quote and I dig it.

The Act of Listening, Especially When It's Hard

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 14:51:31 GMT

This post took me a few days to write and get the courage to share...because for me this post is really hard. I'm grateful that my job allows me to learn from the best in the field of engaging in race related conversations. That being said, I'm white and I still suck at it. Evidence in a recent Facebook "conversation" that went poorly. But I've learned to think of this as work, because that's what the "Courageous Conversations" class called it. I've learned to think of engaging in the conversation as important to live my values, that silence is consent, that being neutral in the face of injustice is not the answer nor the way forward. So here we are. If you could read with a belief in my good intentions dear singular reader, I think we'll find our way onward together.

Sunday September 11 passed and it was 15 years. In the years since I've been humbled by people's experiences and loss. I like every other American have memories of that day, but some people's memories are more visceral and painful than others like mine. Finding out a classmate from business school was focused on renewable energy because he lost a brother that day and wanted to help get American dependence off foreign oil, that humbles me to this day. About a month ago I watched The Falling Man, which is a horrifying refresh of the realities of that day, and of the sanitation we went through as a country to try to heal from this terrorism and tragedy.

But this year I wanted to do something other than post about it personally. Rather than watch Zero Dark Thirty which has become my go-to way to deal with feeling terrorized. Maybe I was inspired by the TED radio podcast the Act of Listening. Maybe recently watching The Falling Man felt like enough remembrance of that day. Maybe it was the fact that Straight Outta Compton on dvd was sitting on my table from Netflix that got me thinking. Reminded me about #Oscarssowhite. And reading on why the ad industry's diversity initiatives are failing. Got me thinking about Colin Kaepernick's nonviolent act of protest of kneeling during the anthem, and both the negative reaction he had received and the acts of support from fellow NFL players and one of my hometown female soccer athletes. And my thought process was this: I wouldn't protest the anthem nor burn the flag, and I will fight for my fellow Americans Constitutional right to do so...but more importantly...why do they feel the need to do so? What is their experience that has driven them to do so on September 11, this sacred American day?

I decided instead of looking online at the 9/11 remembrances and instead of posting on my Facebook, that this year I would spend that day listening. That I would try to understand what I do not "get" based upon my own experience in the most accessible way I could: movies. I would listen by watching Selma and Straight Outta Compton back-to-back as an active steeping in the African American experience and community. And here's the thing that shook out for me by watching these two movies back-to-back that reach back to the 1960s and the 1990s: how very little has changed. Time has passed, but even this recent history has a way of repeating itself.

It's still hard for me to personally imagine kneeling during the anthem on September 11...but that's because I haven't faced the decades long injustices and struggle of African Americans in this country. And if that were my experience, I would be hard pressed to find ways to get people to listen. I would be out of avenues that weren't like kneeling during the anthem. The backlash that has come to the leaders whose voices have been heard and led to change for these communities is severe. In the 1960s, they were murdered. In the 1990s, they were discounted and silenced in the mainstream media as thugs.

What happened when NWA were interviewed by the mainstream media in the 1990s has almost no difference to the way we've engaged in the mainstream media about Black Lives Matter. The average American and the media has only given space to address the "how" there's been engagement in the conversation. The outrage at the method as a way to ignore the message. I keep thinking what I would do if my voice wasn't heard and I felt my life was on the line? Any rational human would say it louder or find new ways to get themselves heard, myself included.

So through the act of listening in the way available to me, I empathized and I learned. And decided firmly that it's not hard to see how we've gotten here at all. I for one want to count my voice in with their movement for justice. Silence is not the answer nor the way forward and I believe more people like me - aka white - need to be anti-racism not just not racist.

I may just be one voice in the void, but I think it matters, because that's what enviro(ish) is all about:
Because you can despair that each action you take is only one tiny drop in the ocean....or you can be inspired that the ocean is made up entirely of tiny drops.

Inspirations: Sweaty Creatives & Triaging Critics

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 14:45:04 GMT

At my best friend's wedding in May, I caught up with a friend from college I hadn't seen in a few years. She offhand mentioned Brene Brown and I asked who that was. Her response included "you are basically what Brene Brown is all about." So when I made it back home I watched her first TED talk on the Power of Vulnerability, immediately followed by her second TED talk on Listening to Shame. Within 5 minutes of finishing I texted my friend and said how obsessed I had become with this message...how honored I was to be thought of as "whole-hearted"...and she sent me Brene's Daring Greatly book and I read it start to finish. It's safe to say it has been a life-changing reframe for me. I read the "Man in the Arena" aka "Daring Greatly" quote often to stay grounded and inspired.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'd encourage you to take some time to listen to her TED talks in order. For the purposes of this blog....finding inspirations that will keep us going...I enjoyed discovering Brene's talk to 99u, which is about supporting the "99% perspiration" principle in the creative community. In it, she focuses on the sweat we expend because of fear of criticism and she extends the arena metaphor to walk us all through how to deal with critics and how to make sure we reserve the best seats for our champions and ourselves.

I love this talk (and I re-listen to it often!) because I think the messaging of feedback and criticism is missing what this brings to it. In business school you have to be open to feedback and it's seen as extremely negative if you are not. But we know there is some criticism that is not helpful, on the far end, there's bullying and trolls and the like. So how do we differentiate constructive feedback from criticism and more importantly, how do we forge ahead when faced with a landslide of criticism? The power is immense in what she's saying here...knowing what the critics will say and saying back: "I see you, I hear you, but I'm going to show up and do this anyway". Bless.

Steep yourself in some Brene Brown...you won't regret!

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
-President Theodore Roosevelt