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!

So I'm clearly pro-Obama.  On this blog I've called him my Prezzy in Rezzy and POTUS with the MOSTUS.  This I know, dear lone reader.  But this time around, when Obama finally said the words that I've been waiting to hear for 2788 days of his Presidency (not to mention eight. extremely. looooooooong. years. of that Dubb-ya fella)...when Obama finally said to the press comments on climate change in real terms the way I've long hoped and expected my President to say...it's as awesome as it is bittersweet.  I can only explain it by saying this: if you've been waiting at a restaurant to be served dinner and after hours and hours the waiter finally drops off dessert minutes before the restaurant closes...how much do you enjoy the dessert?  Isn't the decadence lessened by the long wait and by the coming close? 

I can only relish Obama's climate change talk in the context of his arrival to the end of his POTUS-ness.  Not to mention the sword of Damocles of it potentially all coming undone when an under-minded and small-handed Donald Drumpf potentially wins. God help us all. So even though Obama has done amazing work and joined the Paris Agreement which I've waited my whole enviro(ish) life to see....I just need to take just a beat, just a few short minutes, to point out how absurdly long it took President Obama to get here and finally give this interview to the NY Times on climate.  Seems only fair to have one little blog posted into the interwebs abyss after waiting 66,912 hours.  4,147,320 minutes.  You get the idea.

Because yes.  Obviously.  Absolutely.  He said the things I've longed and ached to hear from POTUS about this issue.  That climate change is terrifying and hearing about it in briefings both depresses people in his Administration and spurs them into action.  That what makes it difficult is the fact it's not an "instantaneous catastrophic event" but "a slow-moving issue that, on a day-to-day basis, people don’t experience and don’t see."  That it's the greatest long-term threat facing the world, one that could lead to massive refugee crises (multiple!) and political instability unseen in our lifetimes.  Welcome to me circa 2002 when I first started looking at these charts and trends.  I mean for reals.  Seriously. I still remember experiencing heart-racing panic in my environmental studies classes.  Actual to-my-bone-marrow, all-out PANIC that this was happening and people were still going about their daily lives in trucks and SUVs, leaving their lights on and letting the A/C or heat out.  Didn't they KNOW?  I remember thinking how panicked they would be too if only they had the same information I did...that any person with even a bit of common sense would be equally freaked out.  If only I could snap them out of it we could get down to doing some real change.  But alas,  I would fail for many years due to a well-funded counter-opinion war by oil companies.  Really "great corporate citizens" who hired literally the same guy that worked for tobacco companies trying to sway opinions that smoking didn't cause cancer to also combat opinions that climate change isn't real and we're not the cause.  No, I'm not kidding.

So it's rewarding to hear my inner dialogue, the one based upon facts and reason and logic...and you know...SCIENCE...coming out of the lips of the person sitting in the most important job in the country and arguably around the globe.  That's a great and wonderful and amazing thing, and my environmentalish philosophy is to celebrate the good...so I'm celebrating it.  I promise.  But 2788 days into his Presidency, I also have to ask just this once, why did it take this obscenely long?

I finally caught up with Al Gore's most recent TED talk from earlier this year giving the latest updates on climate change and the case for optimism.  That's right, optimism!  The results are compelling when it comes to the clean energy revolution, eye-popping proof positive that we are not only going to win this in future tense, but are already on an accelerated path towards winning it right now. 

I'll go through the facts and figures in a future post (or posts...there's a LOT of them!) but as usual wanted to make this personal.  So gotta give a requisite SPOILER ALERT.  Al Gore ends his TED talk with a remembrance to when he was young and heard President Kennedy announce that we would land a man on the moon within ten years.  He recalls hearing adults of the day say that it's reckless, expensive and will fail.  But lo, eight years and two months later when Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moon, the cheer that went up from NASA's mission control was done by a group of systems engineers average age 26.  Meaning they were 18 when they heard Kennedy's announcement and the subtext is that Kennedy's inspiration drove them to commit their careers to space...a mission that proliferated technologies and brought us the "blue marble" view of our planet that helped birth the environmental movement.

My friends, that is me.  I am that "space nerd" except the cause that rallied me was climate change.  At the age of 19 when I began learning about this issue and all environmental issues I felt a deep and lasting pull of the significance of the damage we have caused not only to the planet but to the ecosystems on which we depend for our lives.  What better purpose in life could I find than dedicating myself to overcoming a seemingly insurmountable issue that will save humanity?  By the time An Inconvenient Truth came out I was already on the journey and it just added fuel to my en fuego (thank you to my enviro professor & honors thesis advisor who gifted me this book!)  I've worked in environmental positions since undergrad, always seeking new opportunities to have an even greater impact.  I even spent the dark climate backlash years posting on social media in a failed attempt to change hearts & minds (not sure that worked...a bit of self-reflective criticism on this blog too.  Am I speaking into the void?  What do you think dear reader, my dear singular reader?)

People confuse optimism with naivete.  That optimism can only happen if you don't have enough reality.  I can't tell you the number of times people have looked at me and stated directly that I just don't know better, I'm too young, or rhetorically did a pat on the head for "that's cute" that I have this passion for our planet.  I strongly, whole-heartedly and forever disagree.  And the systems engineers in mission control would too. 

I have walked through the hellfire of what I like to call "eco depression".  I went deep into the dark depths of how badly we've choked ourselves and other living creatures on this planet.  But here's the thing: I've come out the other side.  My optimism comes precisely because I have a strong dose of reality.  I know exactly how steep the path is towards that destruction, but I see the ladders to redemption too, and I choose to go there and bring as many people as I can with me. I choose to amplify and enable those opportunities.  I've made it my life journey and career to find those ladders and invite others to see them and join me on the climb.  "Alone we can go fast, but together we can go far."

It doesn't mean I don't hear "no".  In fact it's quite the opposite.  I hear Oh. So. MANY. No's.  I laugh a little too hard and personally at lines in movies of "No? Is the only word you know, NO?"  But I see those no's as someone who just hasn't gotten the right or enough information to see what I see. 

So get dosed in reality and join team optimistic on climate change.  Take a look at America's climate-explainer-in-chief on the latest for climate change and why we all have cause and hope to be optimistic...I know I am!

So I work for "the man" and I've been around corporate America these last 7+ years.  I like to think of myself as a middle-of-the-road kind of gal.  But the more I dig into the facts and what's happening since my #NoDAPL blogpost on the outrageous event that happened when Native Americans this past holiday weekend stood with Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota Pipeline and were bitten by dogs and attacked with pepperspray...the more outrageous such an already obscene event has become.  The more I'm certain that this corporate entity is the epitome of a bad actor and evil in both its actions and its premeditated intentions.  If "corporations are people" according to the Supreme Court, then Enbridge and Dakota Access LLC are diagnosed psychopaths.  Here's why....

I've been trying to find my own theory of change when it comes to social impact.  I've clearly pegged myself to finding positions of influence on topics of sustainability, environment and now diversity within an organization or "the system".  I still believe that working within an organization is the greatest opportunity to change it, and more importantly, to change it sustainably.  But I struggle with the posture I should take.  As I've grown professionally, I've discovered both the criticality of what it means to be a change agent and the negative feedback you get by being one.  That negative feedback can be as severe sometimes as it is personal.  But I've learned to take it in stride.  I'm a firm believer that because the status quo is heavy that I'm not actually changing things if there is no pushback from somewhere.  True change makes at least one person uncomfortable. 

So I found myself getting philosophically woken up at the LGBT business owners conference when I heard this quote that fits the posture I want to take perfectly:

Originally stated by a man - Bayard Rustin - who is a hero and leader of the civil rights movement, who conceived and organized the great March on Washington, who vociferously and consistently advocated for nonviolent protest after traveling to witness Ghandi's example, and who history has neglected because instead of being closeted, he lived openly as a gay man in that era.  The man who said it is of the highest order of inspiring activists, whose activism was discounted because of who he loved.

Why do I think it's the perfect posture for changemaking?  More after the jump...

There's a little discussed fact in the U.S. when it comes to Tribal peoples mobilization against pipelines in Canada.  They have been at it a lot longer, and they have been successful.  In fact, to understand why Keystone XL pipeline even was requested to bring crude oil allllllll the way down from Alberta (that's Canada) through the U.S. to the Gulf, you have to trace the failure of those same oil companies to successfully get passage on a much shorter westerly journey through British Columbia.  (See my EcoPartyDownload on Keystone XL for more).

I woke up this morning to news that the primarily Native American activists protesting the newly desired corporate pipeline in Dakota walked onto private land to block the construction that had started while the appeal is awaiting to be heard in court...and those people were attacked by dogs from the company's private security firm.  Yes, PEACEFUL PROTESTERS WERE JUST ATTACKED BY DOGS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  I mean...W.T.F.  Is this amateur hour?  Is it 1963? Has the opposition not learned ANYTHING from history?  Is it "opposite day" when it comes to how best to handle peaceful social justice protests?  Who are these awful security people and why should we now trust the people who hired them?  Some kind of modern-era Bull Connors from Birmingham styling themselves as "big deals" because they have a walkie and a dog frothing at the mouth?  Dogs biting children...sigh...why does history always have to repeat itself?  When will people learn?  Why do the words of Nelson Mandela feel so necessary right now for those corporate oilmen to hear?

Activism seems very "environmentalist" instead of "environmentalish" of me...I get it.  Feels intense.  But.... (stick with me after the jump)

Only SNL Weekend Update legend Seth Meyers can:

• take the fact that this is the hottest summer & year on record and make it funny
  
• point out we've experienced extreme weather events that should only happen every 500 years eight times in the last 12 months and make us giggle
  
• make fun of Donald Drumpf's lack of using "all the best words" to even describe the problem...and provide only a hand gesure "like this"
  

Here's to paying attention housewives in lingerie in front of the tv.  Personally, I've always thought the planet has some damn sexy legs....work it girl...work it Mother Earth!

People.  PEOPLE!  I woke up to the news that President Barack Obama and Premier Xi Jinping jointly, formally joined the international climate agreement reached in Paris last year.  It is so FREAKING AWESOME and inspiring that I finally got THE steroid shot of inspiration to get off my duff to blog again...which isn't to say that SO MUCH isn't happening that's already awesome: getting to laugh about extreme weather this summer, getting full-on optimistic by the insanely high adoption of clean energy and getting Republicans to be so supportive of wind it would get removed "over my dead body".  Wow.

But that wow ain't nothing compared to this: having the two largest greenhouse gas emitters JOINTLY agree that their countries have met the necessary requirements and set reductions targets...this my friends is the turning point for our planet and a turnaround that has been 20 years in the making.  

As someone who's been in this space since 2003, there's two certainties if you find normal people with whom to chat about this topic (not the flipping weirdos who argue with me about climate change...but I digress)...they will say "there's no way Congress will pass this" and "well why would we do anything if China won't."  Which were decent points well made until about 5 years ago...particularly because China has become a world leader in the green energy revolution and received absolutely no credit from everyday Americans for this huge successful pivot.  Which means I have spent a ENTIRE DECADE of my life having to argue something that today's joint agreement makes totally irrelevant in the most amazing way.  Let me break this down for you...

Living inside the Beltway for over 3 years I learned a valuable lesson.  Sometimes you really do have to find a way to laugh so that you don't cry.  Thankfully while working on and getting depressed by the George W. Administration's environmentally "protective" activities, I had the Daily Show and Colbert Report to keep me laughing.  And that was before Congress made doing nothing the most electable trait.

So I've long been an admirer of folks who can be pithy and funny about climate change.  It's a talent I will never possess.  Especially when it comes to fitting it all into 140 characters or less, like Stephen Colbert did in my favorite tweet ever... 

​That right there, boom.  Makes you see the absurdity of what people say about this issue.  Bless satire for this power.  

And here's a shiny new best example, the comedic viral video geniuses behind Funny or Die partnered with celebrities to make this spoof on 1985's "We Are The World"...now titled "The Earth's Not Getting Warmer" and brought to you by the Koch Brothers.  Having seen "Green Team" from many years ago, which is funny but unnecessarily off-color, I had my reservations.  But this thing is 110% enviro(ish) approved.

Keep us laughing comedians.  We simply have to laugh so as not to cry. That's been my motto for this past decade, but I might have to rethink it.   With an international climate accord for the first time ever...maybe The Force Awakens is on trend beyond the box office (Harrison Ford! Love that guy.  Bless)...it's time for A New Hope that things are looking up for once.  There is hope for humanity (and our planet) after all.

The first 18 years of my life were spent in very sunny places.  Denver-born, San Diego-raised. I spent the last 4 years back in sunwashed southern California and so the first question I get is how I'm coping with the Seattle weather.  Well, truth be told, I lived in New Hampshire and Washington D.C.  But when I really give an answer, it's usually this:
"I left the state when it was in drought and on fire, so I absolutely love the rain".  And seriously.  I mean it. 

My favorite link right now is the weather in Seattle.  It's an El Nino year not seen since 1997, and I am so excited I just can't hide it.  Halfway through December has already had more precipitation than average.  Bless. 

The more I think about living up here in the PNW (that's the way only Californians like me refer to the Pacific Northwest), the more sustainable it really is.  I take a long, hot, guilt-free shower without turning it on/off navy-style in the way that just was never thinkable in California.  Which leads me to my theory....

I'm going to break tradition here at enviro(ish) and post a really long video on this one.  Because it was new to me when I heard about it at SXSW Eco in October, so you have the full, unabridged keynote from Isha Datar at that conference below.  I am no longer "ick", but excited at the idea of someday being able to eat meat from a lab.  Just like a brewery makes artisan beers, someday we could have customized meat products.  It could grow the market, provide more access to protein to an increasing and undernourished global population, reduce health risk and have the same environmental impact as your regular building instead of this CAFO catastrophe.  WOW.  Definition of a game changer.  Personally, I'd be happy just to finally be a guilt-free meat eater (I know I should be veggie for many reasons...but bah!  I love my meats!)

The idea of growing proteins in a petri dish is actually not that special or hard scientifically.  Making the proteins grow into the textures we are used to eating is the hard part that's currently getting worked on.  We live in a world where biotechnology is actually pushing towards growing replacement organs out of your own tissue/DNA.  And it's significantly, INFINITELY, easier to get edible animal muscle proteins than getting ones your DNA won't reject.  So from that standpoint, this is really a "duh/of course we will" new idea.

So what a fascinating, next-level pursuit Datar is taking with the non-profit New Harvest.  Trying to advocate and support funding and businesses in this new economy and most importantly, change consumer perception.  Because yes, the hardest piece of the puzzle will be getting you to feel comfortable ordering and eating these  new meats.

And if you think this is too far in the future, it's not.  The future is here!  Already! Beyond Meat - the most amazing plant-based meat alternative company from (holla!) El Segundo - is now in Walmart stores nationwide. 

Peoples, this is a trend that's here to stay, and as an enviro(ish) environmentalist...I'm SUPER excited at the idea of getting to still have my meat and eat it too!

I've been reading about the climate deal struck in Paris over the weekend and reflecting this whole year about what might happen.  Something different was in the air.  And it's really, actually, happened.  200 nations have signed onto the climate accord, and it's been something I've hoped for going on 12 years now.  Personally.  Even the horrible California drought I escaped from this year had a respite after five years.  This has been the longest drought of my enviro-life (let's not talk about dating...)

On the Paris Agreement there's nay-sayers and yay-sayers and everyone weighing in and yet I don't hear the most impactful thing being discussed here in the U.S.  It's been and continues to be earnestly discussed.  Since 2007 climate change was buried in the media and hardly given the focal point it deserved.  I've had to read articles outside the U.S. for the best news coverage.  Unlike the past, this year I've heard daily coverage of the talks in Paris in the manner they should be covered - who's there, what's being traded, what's the impact, what the island nation coalition says, what corporations are advocating for.  Every day I hear the coverage and said a prayer in gratitude for the fact that this massive global climate treaty was being treated in the press like a massive global climate treaty. That in and of itself is a huge WIN.  Seriously.  HUGE.  And that's not just my Stockholm syndrome induced by climate change deniers talking.

How climate change is presented and communicated matters.  In fact, I believe that the presentation of this issue matters more than any other aspect.  Climate change is not actually controversial.  Scientifically, logically, morally.  It's pretty straightforward in substance.  Not so straightforward and in fact, twisted, when it translates into the public domain.  In fact, I've been paying close attention over the past year to some signals that fiscal conservatives and Christians from evangelicals to Catholics are rallying behind this great moral test of our time.  Our use of natural resources that is unsustainable and comes from war-torn and unstable places....and maybe that's the best reason ever to stop overusing those resources.

Oh you want to hear more about the actual climate accord and my take?  Not just celebrate the AMAZINGLY POSITIVE news that it's happened and call it a day?  That my friends is the problem with society!  But fine fine, EcoPartyDownload after the jump...

So often what I face in my day-to-day eco-worklife is the same issue that we all face in our day-to-day lives.  Soundbites.  People who have already heard all they want to hear [insert person covering their ears and saying 'la la la laaaa'].  There are real hazards of people not being able to listen with empathy and understand another perspective.  We all have an inherent fear and ego of allowing ourselves to be challenged (let alone be proven wrong).  But it’s an absolute must, not just on the society but on the personal level.

I have so many posts I’ve wanted to write these last months as I transitioned jobs and made big life changes to a shiny new city.  This is the thing I wanted to say that tipped the scales (never fear though, Pope-est with the Mostest and Laudato Si will be coming in hot. Soon.)  And it’s all thanks to a communications lead at Monsanto.
​
Last year I came to SXSW Eco and sat in the panel session when Monsanto underwent what I can only describe as a live feeding frenzy of pent-up anti-GMO fervor.   A courageous woman from Monsanto did one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen from a sustainability professional: she invited more conversation in the heat of the moment.  Which is exactly what these most thorny issues desperately need the most.  Real dialogue.  But how do we get there?  How do we increase everyone’s personal responsibility to listen better?