interviews
Pain Is The Price of Consciousness
by Max Moinian
September 17, 2019
This interview with Max Moinian was conducted and condensed by frank news. Max was the co-editor of our May 2018 issue on Urban Planning.
frank: Hi! Tell us about yourself and Future Earth.
Max: I am Max Moinian, I have a Master's in Urban Design from MIT, and Future Earth is a climate change education platform, right now just on Instagram. It’s a newborn baby I had with Steph Shepherd, who is a total social media and marketing genius. We think our combined brains are good parenting. Good information that is enticing and digestible.
This all happened because mutual friends told us we were both climate change crazy ladies. We met and finished each other’s sentences. She convinced me that more celebrities would engage in environmentalism if the cause was packaged for them. So we tried a rebranding exercise. Make it cool and sexy. Do for the treehugger what Gloria Steinem did for feminism, if you will. But also survey what’s out there and fill in the gaps.
What are the gaps?
Plastics have suddenly become the environmental villain on social media.
I’m not mad at that, plastics are a gateway drug to environmentalism, but let’s take it a step further and talk about petrochemicals and how the same shit making those bottles is in your activewear and household products, and powering your car and house.
Basically what we're doing is trying to visually represent information we're reading, and make it enticing and clear for Instagram. I'll do the heavy lifting and read through the dense reports, make three-step guides, and report back on Instagram. Everything from science lessons, to consumer and lifestyle tips, ways you can get involved, and movies to watch. It’s imperative to me that we reflect on the psychological, personal aspect about learning about climate change. My own journey was so emotional and I found it hard to find a shoulder to lean on and people to have those conversations with.
Facts aren’t everything. Feelings are facts too.
How did you end up focusing on climate issues?
It's crazy to think that years of Ivy League education, undergrad at Barnard, Master's at MIT, and you know, private school before that – all of it – never touched on the very rudimentary and basic information about climate change that everyone needs to know. It was never presented to us, I read headlines but they never stuck, and somehow I got away with ignoring it all of those years.
via Max Moinian
Then there I was at MIT – the grand narrative is how do we design and protect cities from the coming environmental perils? So, sea level rise, temperature rise, extreme weather, pollution, deforestation…. All of it from a policy and design standpoint. I focused on design, so, seawalls and engineering systems to address the consequences of global warming. But what about the causes? Why can’t we start there? Why aren’t we talking about it?
In design studios, we were tasked to protect cities by building things.
We had projection data for the year 2100 without fully understanding what's causing sea level rise in the first place.
It really bothered me. I felt like this world of mobilized urban designers and architects are at the end of a line that starts with the science, goes through technology and policy, and leaves us with a very limited, pathetic toolkit. Real innovation doesn’t happen at the end of the line, you know?
We're still that client-based discipline where you just have to do whatever the client says and not necessarily what you stand for. I busted my ass to get an internship at BIG because I wanted to work on the BIG U. I got disenchanted in three seconds. I remember one night I called my advisor and told him I was morally conflicted.
We were using taxpayer money to protect people, but mostly to protect valuable assets.
To be fair, the opportunities the firm had were completely restricted by policy and bureaucratic nonsense. But I wanted no part in it. He told me I had to make the choice of working within the system to change it, or go full radical. And I guess I’ve been testing the outlaw territory ever since.
via Max Moinian
What's the best way to a) begin your personal education in climate change, and b) retain information without feeling constantly overwhelmed and emotionally drained?
I know better than anyone how hard it is to commit time in your life to this topic. I didn’t do it until I had six months to research and write a thesis. I thought, I'm going to devote to learning about climate change now because when else can I do this? I wasn’t worried that climate science had no clear place in urban design. I knew I’d figure out a way to get away with it.
I spent most of those days making a matcha latte, getting back in bed, and reading a book for the morning. Then writing and drawing in the afternoon. It was a glorious time of ultimate brain activation. I loved being isolated in my little academic bubble. Not everyone can do that, not everyone wants to do that, no one has the time. So here’s a cheat sheet:
Step one: start with the basic facts. How does climate change and what does that mean for the future? But also, how do we get data and make projections? What are the main causes? What are our options? Your resource is the IPCC. Don't listen to what anyone else has to say except the IPCC and climate scientists. And don’t be ashamed if you need a refresh on middle school science. There's a textbook version of IPCC reports for young adults that I reference constantly.
Step two: a brief history of how climate science has been politicized. Seeing how the proof and solutions have been muzzled by Big Oil and politics is mindblowing.
It showed me that we are not as dependent on the systems we rely on today as we may think.
It also made me hyper-skeptical but in a good way. I love Naomi Oreskes and Naomi Klein, two badass women who write clearly but also have documentaries and interviews you can watch.
Step three: take care of yourself. It took a few breakdowns for me to admit that I wasn’t invincible and this was seriously heavy shit. It’s emotional, and most people connect emotionally. I've read the facts, I know the projections. But it never registered for me. You know, but at the same time you don’t know.
Because my capacity to imagine what two degrees of warming looks like is low. Because this is the most daunting, helpless topic possible.
This is the equivalent of the atom bomb. This is the environmental narrative of our time, and it's really hard to do anything when you know that the problem is so far beyond your little self, your community, your country. It's the entire world, with no silver-bullet solution, and no end in sight, and that's fucking scary.
Yes, it really is.
One time, when I was in the depths of knowing too much, like borderline depression, I was sitting with a professor who will probably never know how much she means to me. As I was talking I think she could just tell something was not right, and she put her arm on my shoulder and said, "Honey, you need to read some Rebecca Solnit." So I bought this book Hope in the Dark and I've gone back to it maybe five times already. It was the hug that I needed. I needed to know that there are people that know more than me and they are still fighting. And I needed to see that they had happy normal lives, or at least appeared to.
Another game-changing book is Living In Denial by Kari Norgaard. The psychology of inaction. She says,
"Pain is the price of consciousness. To be conscious in the world today is to be aware of vast suffering and unprecedented peril."
No one wants to feel like that. Everyone has a threshold, a cap to how much of those kind of feelings you can harbor. And we're all maxing out on our personal issues, our family, our life. You know, millennial burnout or whatever.
Who wants to willingly experience that much pain?
Right.
To exist is painful enough.
Sometimes I get pissed off watching people go about their day, nonchalant, like parked with the engine running, A/C blasting with the windows down, watching TV on their iPhone. And I feel like this person doesn't care. And I’m almost jealous at how simple life seems to be in their mind, so guilt free and chill. But to Norgaard that's actually really difficult to do: “Apathy is the mask of suffering.” It's really hard to suppress all those existential thoughts and feelings, but because it's so much harder to actually deal with them, we lean towards denial.
Being hyper-aware is a massive burden. I've never sought out therapy in my life – I just started seeing a psychologist who specializes in climate anxiety. Being an activist and educator means I’m committing to VIP care for my mental health. Because that is my MVP!
As Solnit says, “Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism.”
interviews
In Conversation with LANDING STUDIO, Part 2
by LANDING STUDIO
May 12, 2018
This interview with Marie Law Adams and Dan Adams, the founding principals of LANDING STUDIO, was conducted and condensed by frank news. This is part two of an ongoing conversation between frank and LANDING STUDIO.
I heard you guys just won an award at APA.
MARIE: Yes, that’s our first recognition by a planning group.
You’re in the planning department at MIT, Dan directs the architecture department at Northeastern, your firm is winning planning awards. What does the tension mean to you? What does it mean to be in the middle of it?
MARIE: It's exactly what has defined our practice. Everything we're working on is at a moment of disconnect between something happening on the ground and something in policy.
We appreciate the pressures of environmental policy on infrastructure to push new ways of thinking about how these sites work.
I think that failure happens when the policy appears as a hurdle to industries. They hold off on improvements for as long as possible.
What the moment of departure for you in architecture school? When did you realize that your interest was beyond buildings?
MARIE: We both come from architecture programs that discouraged us from making buildings. It was more of a design-focused education. I think we took that to heart and never really invested in thinking much about buildings. Rather, what are bigger pictures that can be solved or addressed through design in some way.
DAN: I think it was revelatory to start our practice with this Salt Pile. To see a landscape that operates at one scale. But then witness this constant state of kinetics to realize that the landscape is overtly connected to the rest of the world.
Who is designing those urban relationships? What are the mediums through which to do it?
DAN: We always run into this scenario. We talk about our work and people reference projects like the High Line that New York. It's a very post-industrial. I think often that's where people see the role of designers: how to literally convert former industrial operations into a domesticated program for the city, for recreation. Rather than thinking about situating their work within the design of industrial operations themselves.
MARIE: A highway or bridge is filled with design constraints. They have different types of opportunities around them. Our design evolved as soon as we talked to the bridge inspectors. We understood how to support what they do but also allow public access to the community.
How do you define the community?
DAN: the definition of community is a difficult question on a lot of these sites. I think a lot of times there is some default conception that the community is the people who live within a specific proximity.
MARIE: Which it is…
DAN: It certainly is. But more and more we're coming to understand that these things are part of a broader, regional, and in fact global community, particularly when you're talking at the scale of infrastructure and industrial systems.
When you put it at the scale of the environment, a decision made in Boston must keep in mind the people in perhaps Yemen, where the natural gas is actually produced before it gets here.
MARIE: I think that comes into play through policy. The question becomes, how does that process work out on the ground? The communities that we do have access to are super local. But the policy advocates for the more regional impacts of these spaces. We try to negotiate those interests in the project.
How did the light installation change attention to the area from the community?
MARIE: We wanted the installation to start a conversation, and then see what happens. It led to some strange —
DAN: Observations…
MARIE: Mainly through newspaper articles. Local newspaper articles would poke fun at the project. And criticize the industry for trying to communicate back to the community.
DAN: But it also unveiled certain things. They interviewed people in the city. Different people had different responses, they would say things like “Oh I think this is great because I don't care about the lighting in this salt pile, but it brings more light onto the street. The street’s normally creepy and dark and it kind of helps address that issue.”
MARIE: Or “oh can we propose here?”
DAN: That's the weird irony. People used it as a platform to criticize the industry. And yet in the same article someone asked if they could propose on the salt pile. It immediately shows the conflicted nature of these things. Why people feel the way they feel.
This question of being part of a community, one way to do that is to hold meetings where people come and talk.
MARIE: And we do that.
DAN: Another type is to to actually work with people who are changing the light fixtures on the highway. We have spent nights talking with them about their job and what they do, and by getting to know them we learn about issues in the area.
MARIE: That's how we started our work with the MASS DOT [Department of Transportation]. They asked us to do a two week, temporary light installation under the Southeast Expressway in Boston. We ended up doing it for two years. Every two weeks to a month we'd go out there at night for six hours or so, changing the lights. We got to be intimately familiar with the light and the nightlife of the space. We saw it change dramatically in the few years that we were there.
DAN: That's a funny thing in the design world. How removed people are from the things they design. Our approach is to try and be engaged with the communities we're designing for.
MARIE: It’s challenging. It does take a lot of time to do that. The Charlesgate project is the first that was initiated from a community group. It feels like a different context for us because they've already got their own organizational structure around the place. They're doing tours and trying to bring people into the site. In some ways there is less burden on us to stir up activity, as we did in other projects. The more abandoned, industrial or infrastructural ones.
Can you talk about the dinosaurs?
MARIE: The dinosaurs are part of the Underground at Ink Block Project. The highway changes form—
DAN: We call one side the Fray. Like a fraying rope. All the strands of the highway spread apart. Water and light get down under the highway, and the area has no surface roads. It’s important to point out. People look at a highway and just call it a highway. But there are radically different architectures. The other side is what we call the Bundle, where all of the ramps compress into a really tight strand, about 15 lanes wide. It’s a 200-foot wide viaduct. There is no water or light. It has surface roads, so huge amounts of sound get trapped. Whereas in in the Fray, no sound traps. It emanates into the atmosphere.
Via Landing Studio. Boston, MA | 2016
The dinosaurs are an effort to make the experience of passing through that cave more pleasant. Essentially through lighting and art installation. But it is not a space to encourage people to spend time in. It's not really a pleasant environment.
But it is a route.
DAN: It's a route that's heavily travelled. The dinosaurs are meant to make passage less threatening. The other parts of the landscape address ecosystem performance and recreation. They encourage people to spend time. The design differences come from physical differences in the infrastructure itself.
Via Landing Studio. Boston, MA | 2016
Olmsted was trying to mask these ecosystem operations. Maybe now we’re more open to seeing how things work. How do you deal with people who call it ugly?
MARIE: We've been doing a lot of work with the Emerald Necklace Conservancy. The president, who's a planner, is frustrated by the fact that many Bostonians don't know that the Emerald Necklace is an infrastructural system. It was designed to manage floodwater and urbanization at a time when Boston grew really quickly. It's an entirely constructed landscape but it appears to be natural and pastoral. That English, picturesque imagery. It appears as if it was always there. Whereas other, more infrastructural environments like the highways are so clearly built by humans.
Image via LANDING STUDIO. Charlesgate. Boston, MA | 2017-Present
I think it became pretty obvious early on working with salt piles. You can't try to compete with that scale, or make things go away, or mitigate their impact. You have to just work with what's there.
DAN: Over the last 10 years it has become a weird kind of marketing. Typical condominium developments now embrace an edgy, industrial aesthetic. It makes people more apt to accept actual infrastructure and industrial systems in their city. It is challenging. On a lot of our park projects, for example, we want to use habitat-rich, native plants. But people say oh it looks weedy and demand that it gets mowed down, which eliminates the habitat. You realize so much of it is about perception of things.
MARIE: I find in the communities we work with that the perception of natural-looking landscapes is more controversial than the industrial relics themselves.
DAN: Joan Iverson Nassauer wrote a great piece called Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames. It is about how in cities, we try to hide from ourselves the things we don't like about ourselves. That operates on so many scales. It means that the oil refinery goes far away. Sewage goes down into pipes where you can't see it. We mow the plants so that they seem controlled and orderly. We sterilize things with toxic chemicals. All so that we don't have to confront the parts of ourselves we don't like. Some of it is probably a strange fiction we've inherited over time, through market and aesthetic regimes that we think are preferable now.
We now know how much of those are premised on really bad environmental concepts, global inequity and injustice. Even toxic chemicals to make things sterilized or to make neon-green lawns. It’s the same way we have to work against 100 years of problematic infrastructure development.
MARIE: I think the communication of intent is really important in a landscape that doesn't appear manicured.
Use your design education to change the narrative so that people think this is what they want.
DAN: At I-93 for example, we diverted the highway’s train leaders into the landscape. At the end of the train leaders there are rocky deposits that catch all of the cigarette butts, styrofoam, leaves, grit, and everything else nasty that flows off of highways. So you now have to see all of those things when you go there. But it also makes maintenance very easy. You just rake it out and put in a trash bag. It used to just go into the ocean, and that was great, right? Because the tide comes in every six hours and takes that stuff away. You can pretend it no longer exists because it's just gone.
MARIE: There does have to be a shift in what you want to see in public, open space in order to do this.
There's clearly a design intention to collecting all this junk in one place. Is it also intentional to have people see it?
MARIE: I don't think that our design team knew that that was going to happen, and we didn't really know either. It was something that we started observing once the project was under construction. All of a sudden we were like, ok this is actually interesting, that it becomes legible in the landscape.
DAN: Planning is flawed with concepts of isolation. This is where planning sort of undermines the value of design. As designers we believe you can design solutions to complicated things.
MARIE: That friction is really important though.
DAN: Planning aims to separate frictions. Like, oh it's a problem to have a refinery next to a community or an elementary school.
And the truth is, yes, it is. Either you eliminate that friction or redesign it. But the idea that those frictions somehow go away, just by keeping those places physically isolated, is a problematic environmental philosophy.
MARIE: You're starting this issue with Thomas Campanella’s essay and the fear of big projects. think today we're dealing with the legacy of those big projects, but can only do small projects to react to them.
In Boston, stormwater that comes into the city goes through a whole network of green infrastructure projects. You have to just operate in the margins.
DAN: There’s no one thing that could fix it all. Which is funny with something like the LA River. It’s a bit of a sick irony that in a city that is deprived of water, the fundamental principle managing water is to get it out of the city. And in that process, contaminate and kill any habitat that could be provided by the water. That's one of the strange philosophies of the last 100 years.
This is not totally surprisingly in the petroleum era: the idea that nature and cities are antithetical. We became enemies with natural systems and the goal was to flush them from the city, put them in the ocean. Yet for thousands of years natural processes are what fueled cities. This is what I mean by a radically wrong philosophy.
The industrial revolution and the era of petroleum was fundamentally about that. A source of energy more powerful than gravity, more powerful than the wind, that could let us do things no longer contingent on natural processes. And then that became the philosophy of cities. That we don’t have to work with these systems— we could actually work in spite of them. We are seeing the consequences of that now.