Sarah Holtz Interviews Frances Roberts Gregory, environmental sociologist

SH: What are some of the best ways to combat misinformation about climate change?

FRG: I think there are a lot of approaches. From a climate communications perspective, for change you need dialogue. Often times scientist or even well-meaning advocates and activists, we come in saying, “I’m right. You’re wrong. Listen to me” and the conversation is very unidirectional. We need multidirectional dialogue which means that you really have to share and listen.

I would also say that psychology is really important. To admit that climate change exists means that there are limits to growth. That challenges a lot of traditional economic theories that people hold. It challenges this idea that America is a place where everyone has opportunity and you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It challenges people who were taught to think in linear ways to think in hierarchies.

Really, to combat this misinformation, it begins with stories, having an open heart dialogue and also having some empathy I would say because to attack people’s deeply held beliefs, almost religious beliefs at this point, is very disconcerting. People don’t do well with uncertainty.

You see the panic that’s going on with the crisis around COVID-19. We don’t teach people how to manage uncertainty and change. I think a lot of frontline communities, communities of color are used to dealing with uncertainty because we’ve always existed in a state of crisis, but for other folks, it challenges everything.

I think we have to figure out ways to allow people to grieve and deal with anxiety so that they can admit that there is a problem and then be encouraged to participate in actions to deal with the problem.

I know for a while we really just need to work with people who are willing to listen and plant seeds. You might plant a seed in a denier today, it might not sprout for 10 or 20 years, but I promise you, once we keep having disasters like fires, floods, droughts, food shortages, there are people who are public deniers in the privacy of their homes, they understand what’s going on because they’re being impacted.

SH: In thinking about all the ways that climate anxiety is manifesting both for folks in denial and those who are in frontline communities, what are some examples of climate resilience that you’ve seen?

FRG: For me, when I think of resilience, I think of people who dare to dream, to smile, to laugh, to dance, to build despite hundreds of years of violence. All of the frontline communities, the communities that have struggled so much where that trauma is almost embedded in our DNA, have figured out ways to take lemons and make lemonade, to invoke all my grandmother’s ambiance. For me, the audacity to get up every morning is resilience. I should also say that resilience is a controversial word because people are tired of having to be resilient. Why? Why do we keep having to fight? It’s tiring.
For a more climate-focused conversation, I think that the women who are engaged in green infrastructure inspire me. They’re saying, “Hey, we’re tired of this street flooding, so we’re going to have rain gardens and rain barrels.” That inspires me. I think about the folk who are engaging in sustainable, organic, regenerative farming who are bringing back heirloom varieties, who are figuring out ways to grow using aquaponics and agroecology.

I think about also the folk who are living in ceremony who are practicing gratitude, figuring out ways, in the words of Asia Marie Brown, “promote pleasure activism,” to find joy within toxic landscapes despite ongoing chronic violence.

We all have a role to play. I definitely want to increase the representation of underrepresented folks in climate policy spaces because these spaces are still mostly white and male. That’s not appropriate.

Also, there is so much creative potential in frontline communities, indigenous communities, women of color and women in general. I really want to increase our representation in these decision making spaces, and I want to share these stories. That’s my role as a griot. That’s my roles as a feminist anthropologist, as a black geographer; to share these stores and hope that they inspire a call to action.

As an Afrofuturist I really hope that our futures are based in healing. The idea of resilience is to return to the past and the stats quo. I don’t want to return to the status quo. I want something better. I want something great.

SH: I also know you identify as an “eco-womanist”. What’s an eco-womanist?

FRG: An eco-womanist as defined by Dr. Melanie Harris is a feminist environmentalist, a woman of color who connects the personal to the political and political to the personal.

Really, this is based off the work of the great Alice Walker. She coined the term “womanism,” which is women of color’s version of feminism because many women of color had an issue with how white middle class women had coopted the feminist movement. They said, we need our own term that relates to our own experiences.

A womanist is a feminist of color, so an eco-womanist is a feminist of color who believes that women of color have unique solutions for environmental degradation and addressing the climate crisis and who also are really connected to ancestors and future generation and understanding what a woman of color environmental ethic looks like.

SH: Yes, and you’ve also written about the importance of a feminist lens on the global Green New Deal. Could you talk about that?

FRG: Yes, of course. Although we can debate for days about the wording of the Green New Deal because there is baggage that comes along with that language, we do need policies that make sure that there is an earth for future generations and that we are thinking about equity when we talk about renewables and living more sustainably when we talk about green infrastructure.

We also have to bring an intersectional perspective because when we don’t center frontline communities, indigenous communities, when we don’t center women and we don’t center human rights, we actually exasperate the problem.

Most people don’t realize that climate change does not impact us all equally. Climate change actually exasperates existing gendered and racialized inequalities.

Using an intersectional perspective, we can talk about how after many disasters, there is a rise in gender violence, domestic violence and also sex trafficking and violence against indigenous women.

We could talk about how women make up the bulk of the membership of grassroots organizations, how women are water protectors, how reproductive justice is connected to climate change and how, when we have extreme weather and disasters, there is a rise in pre-term births and women who deal with children with low birth weights.

Even how it impacts LGBTQ communities and their inability to access resources and hormones and how they might not have access to certain shelters or they’re put in shelters that are inappropriate that exposes them to increased violence.

I would finally add that it’s important when we talk about gender and climate change, although I focus on women and women of color, gender is not synonymous with women. Gender is everyone. Gender impacts everyone. Everyone has a gendered norm. We’re talking about impacts on men, on women, on non-binary folks, the LGBTQ communities.

There is a need for greater research but once again, we’re having to take baby steps so that people understand first that there is a climate crisis, that it doesn’t impact everyone equally and that the people who contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions are usually the ones most impacted by disaster.

Sarah Holtz interviews Peter Fimrite, environmental reporter, San Francisco Chronicle

PF: I remember that night when the (2017 Northern California Wine Country fires) first began. I came out of a movie with my daughter. It was really warm, unusually warm and extremely windy. I had never really felt that before, how windy it was. Then I started smelling smoke and I knew something big was going on. Right then, I got a call from my editor. I got in my car and went out to the fires.

As I was driving out there, the flames were shooting up on both sides of the car and I actually drove through flames at one point. Flames were licking the car and there were ashes flowing. It was quite scary. Several other reporters have had that same experience that night and during the Camp Fire. A lot of these fires have been like that with really strong winds. I think I left at around 11:30 pm or 12:00 pm and ended up working all night on the fire with no sleep. The fires have been unusual, and people are starting to realize their connection to climate change.

SH: When I initially reached out to you, you had just come off of doing a story about the Australian bush fires. Can you talk about what that reporting process was like?

PF: Australia has a similar climate. It’s much, much bigger than California, but it has a similar, warmer, dryer climate in many places. Their fires this year have been absolutely catastrophic, similar to what California went through over the last few years. I covered the first in Australia and wrote about how they are similar to California’s. I talked to climate scientists about the similarities.

SH: To what extent do you think grassroots activism will lead to systemic change?

PF: Systemic change will come when people demand action. Basically, any action requires the public to be behind it. Any systemic change requires the public to be behind it. I think that’s a really important part. The scientists are already believe, 98% to 99% of them, that climate change is here, it’s happening, it’s caused by humans. But there is a whole segment of the United States and the world who just don’t believe it.

SH: How do you approach conversations with folks who don’t believe in climate change?

PF: I’m not going to argue with their point of view. Everybody has a right to their point of view. What they don’t have a right to is facts. Facts are facts. That’s what I stick with. I tell them what I know about what the scientists say, what the research has shown. It does irritate me that there are a lot of completely false narratives going around. I try to stick with the facts and tell people what’s really happening. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.

SH: Also, potentially your role as a reporter, pointing to the evidence will eventually impact public opinion.

PF: Well, circumstance will also play into it over time. People are seeing more flooding, more fires. The sea levels are rising already in some places. Over time, people are going to have to realize what’s happening and take action. Whether it’s in time or not is the question.

Sarah Holtz interviews Monique Verdin, artist, storyteller, filmmaker

MV: My Louisiana Love is about an hour long documentary. Through this personal lens of documenting my life and my family, there ends up being this multigenerational story of my grandmother and her being raised in what is now a disappeared land in some cases but was a place as a child. There were prairies, there were pecan groves, there was a healthy ridge. To recognize that in one’s lifetime how quickly things have changed and how that loss of land and connection to the water has side effects as a people being disconnected from our life ways and literally, our ability to feed ourselves.

I think of it as putting a parentheses around the last one hundred years in South Louisiana but from an indigenous perspective, a hyper personal perspective, which was not the original intention when I started collecting footage in the late ‘90s.
I think for me, in making My Louisiana Love, it has also been me trying to understand what’s happening here.

SH: I’m super curious about the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange. How did that get started and what are you hoping to accomplish?

MV: We need more spaces where we can come together and determine where we are, what we’re losing and what we think needs to be remembered, collected, shared and distributed and how to do that from plant materials to memories and photographs.

The Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange came out of a project called Cry You One. “cry you one” being a saying that Cajun fiddlers would say instead of “let me play you a song.” They would say, “Let me cry you one.”

In 2013, this part performance, part procession, part eco experience happened in my community of Saint Bernard Perish. I was invited to come on as a part of a design team at first and then they started making me read some of the poetry and I was suddenly the protagonist. It was an interesting project. I had never worked in performance art before. I tried to tell the story of South Louisiana in a way of if you have to leave, what are you going to bring with you? We have no way to really mourn what’s being lost here.

And so I have this sixteen foot geodesic dome. We set this dome on the land where we were working and then we covered half of it with palmettos, so it looked like a traditional Houma structure when you first approached it. Then the backside was covered with another amber material and then I had woven some of my photographs which I output on transparencies into that skin. It created this weird, beautiful stained-glass effect almost where the light would shine in if you were inside the structure. It was a bit of a holding space for folks because we had to transport them across a little canal.

And that experience for me was so powerful and so intimate. But what ends up being really magical and something that is not easy to document is that when we activate the space with different kinds of instillations and share photographs and maps of the community, people come into these spaces that we create and vocalize their memories and then another person’s history and reference points are documented. It’s about getting people to get in the same space with each other to be able to reflect.

There are community meetings here all the time and they’re not productive. When you give somebody three minutes to basically try to defend their way of life and their home, and then like they’re told “OK you’re times up, get out of here,” it’s impossible and more frustrating than it is productive. In so many cases, it feels like the officials who are hosting those meetings are just going through the motions. The decisions have already been made and there is really no steering that whether than means a pipeline project or a river diversion.

SH: You mentioned that one of the proposed solutions from the state is this engineering intervention that supposes that maybe it’s too late. Do you working within that framework or are there ways to solve that problem? At this point, since a lot of your work is so personal and focused on place and family and home, is it about preservation or all of the above?

MV: Recently my new mantra is “remain and reclaim.” I think that “life or leave” doesn’t feel right. “Retreat and return,” that’s a big maybe. I also wonder often if I’m kidding myself. Did I drink the Kool-Aid too and think that I can build a house on a concrete slab on top of land that is essentially like putting land and there be a big levy wall around me that the federal government spent $1 billion to build and is sinking? I can get flood insurance. Okay, I’ll get a mortgage on that, first time homeowner.

There are times when I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth saying, “Home is home. There’s no place like home. Plant your fruit trees. Keep your seeds growing.” Then there is another part of me that’s like, “You know what? I live right down the street from two major oil refineries and I’ve packed my car too many times to evacuate to be naive and think that I won’t have to do that again.” I also don’t know where to run to.

SH: It makes sense, talking about both sides of your mouth because a situation as complex and as rife with systemic inequality is going to force people to have to operate in both mindsets at all times.

MV: I think when I really think about what I need most, it is my community. I think that when everyone was scattered to the wind after Katrina and then that ability to come home, but also that people have to leave home all the time all over the world for many different reasons and that, as time goes on, the great migration from the coast has already begun and it will continue. But also, at the same time, I think that we have a right to maintain a relationship with the land and the water because it is family as well.

I feel like Chicken Little; “The land is sinking!” “The oil is coming!” We might be on the verge of the apocalypse or it just happened. I’m not sure. I feel that way sometimes.

I think if you allow nature to do what it knows to do, it has the ability to heal itself with a little bit of support and a little bit of umph behind it. If you help to shepherd that just a tiny bit, it’s really inspiring to know that we should be more in collaboration with nature than this kind of domination that we’ve had over the land.

I live in the heart of Cancer Alley just north of the Dead Zone in South Louisiana in a place that provides one-third of the nation’s oil and gas. Now with the fracking boom, we are retrofitting pipelines to export fossil fuels to international markets. We have made the ultimate sacrifice.

It’s really important for us to all remember that we are connected to this. The delta doesn’t just matter for me, it matters for planetary well-being. This is a power point where life comes to be born. Birds stop on great migrations. There used to be cypress forests with trees all around. If we allow nature to do what it does, it can survive this, but we’re going to have to let go of believing that we can control it.