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)

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....

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.

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.  ;)

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!

I haven't posted a blog in a while.  Most of the reason is that in the post 11/9 Trumpster fire I am channeling my activities into a Facebook-Live-recorded daily resistance where every weekday I call my Republican Senator and curate a list of actions I'm taking to try to have an impact in these troubled times.  But to ignore the moment that started me on this journey would be not right.  It would make my actions seem a little too angelic and altruistic.  Whatever they seem to you I can assure you that I am not either.  

The catalyst that got me started with my first Facebook live on calling my Senator was a white guy.  A well-meaning but insistent white guy who after a congenial hour and a half coffee chat when I said "hey I have to go pick up some posters for the In Solidarity with Muslims March later" decided that was the time to try to talk about "the Resistance".  He self-proclaims to be an independent who in real terms is liberal/progressive and the conversation stayed congenial so it was 5 or 10 minutes into it that I realized he was trying to argue with me.  He was trying to correct me.  He was trying to mansplain where the Women's March got it wrong.  And the phrase that sticks with me is "you all have been so extreme and should find some policy goals and places to work together"...to which inside my head I said something to the effect of "what the fuck, are you kidding me???!?  How do you not see what's happening right now" And out of my mouth I said "I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what is happening to our democracy right now.  We are fighting for a return to first principles."  But he didn't give it up.  And so when I finally left, I went to the March and when I got back I was still stewing.  It made me so angry.  That this guy who placidly saw things, who wasn't personally impacted by the situation, who wasn't engaged in the struggle thought that instead of truly listening and learning that from his white ivory tower *he* knew what was best.  A guy who never lived in DC like I had.  A guy who had never been a Federal government contractor like I had been.  A white guy with all the privilege that it entails in "Manver", the nickname of my new city Denver.  Who the fuck does he think he is?  And why does he think it OK to overwrite my much more knowledgeable voice on this situation?

Focus not on my anger dear reader, I channeled that in a positive and constructive manner like I usually do.  It got me to do these daily resistance videos.  But do focus the latter.  My voice.  I recorded that first Facebook video just as a one-off to show that with a call to my Republican Senator because I decided that I wouldn't let his ignorance be something that lessened me.  That quieted me.   I refused.  I had the womens voices from January 21 still fresh in my head and they were so powerful, and they were so true, they called out to me like sirens, and I answered their call.

Further below I talk about the amazing experience of attending the Women's March on Washington, and my experiences before and afterwards to continue attending marches and rallies for causes I care about.  There are so many good reasons to join in the movement with your actual bodies, or as Rep John Lewis says "find some good trouble", or as Gloria Steinem said at the Women's March "put your bodies where your beliefs are."  My feelings on climate change are extremely, super, duper, really, insanely, obvious. 

But I wanted to start this blog addressing the elephant in the room (I do lurve elephants, but that's not connected to this post!).  And that's the criticism that rallies don't do anything, they are pointless.  I want to put aside the really stupid and ignorant comments like Women's Marchers are running around naked (<-actual comment from someone on my Facebook, we're not in the 60's kids, and even then I don't think bra burning = running naked on the National Mall #justsaying)....and I want to put aside my typical reaction which is "haters gonna hate, ainters gonna ain't" (courtesy of the movie I got cyberattacked by North Korea over and am proud to have part of prevailing in the face of terrorism #freespeechrepresent).  I'd like to spend a minute and focus on the root of what they are saying.  They are ultimately questioning whether protests and marches are a valid way to lead to real change.  

If any message has been pounded on the liberal/progressive side since 11/9, it has been that we're in an echo chamber.  That we do not listen, we don't understand the economic ravaging of rural America, that we do not speak for "real" Americans.  But the media is a filtered version of everyone's reality, and an increasingly, insanely skewed one at that (I will save the actual problem with fake news for later).  For example, in microcosm, how do you square there being clearly over 100 people (see my video on Twitter) with a report by my local Denver Fox affiliate as "dozens" with a weak photo of 1/5 of the crowd?  It's inaccurate and bias.  The media is a funnel in which the news pops out with biases. 

In a polarized world we are looking for something, but I'd like to differentiate once and for all.  There's a HUGE difference between looking for media that validates your position or self-soothes you on your views...and the search for truth with a scout mindset.  People have labeled some news outlets as liberal because they often support the liberal and progressive side in op-eds and so forth, but that just politicizes and polarizes.  The fundamental issue I have with outlets like Fox News or even Breitbart is not that they are championing a conservative viewpoint, but that they are entirely unleashed from facts and from the search for truth.  

So how do we combat this?

Resolutions.  I was listening to the commentary from Times Square leading to 2017 about resolutions and something struck me.  How not only are New Year's resolutions themselves, but also the way we talk about them, so indicative of how things used to be for me.  We would make a commitment for our own good (rarely the greater good), a bit of self-improvement, and (at least in my case), by the time Lent rolled around in February I would have to make a whole new commitment to self-improvement.  Resolutions have a shelf life of maybe a week....and that's only because you have to eat that food you bought. We give up before we even start.  We release ourselves from achievement before we've even tried. 

I've lived nothing but change and tumult for these last couple months.  And not only because I moved from Seattle to Denver and changed jobs over the holidays, and not only because the aftermath of election day launched my commitment to Never Forget 11/9 and get activist.  When thinking about typical resolutions (prune through your closet, get rid of junk, eat healthier), I'm actually doing a lot of them already compared to 2016.  I think the tumult I had not anticipated was of the internal and relational variety.  By stepping out unapologetically into the sunlight, I found that my light reflected made some cover their eyes and turn away.  The more I became the person I am and I embrace the person I am meant to be...the more parts of my former life reject me.  And I have a choice...do I reach back out and keep those parts of myself at all costs?  Or do I let those relationships pass away with the former parts of myself?
[Read more below the jump]

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]

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]

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".

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:

1. 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. 
   
2. 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)

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!

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...