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
BIGHT: COASTAL URBANISM
by Susannah Drake & Rafi Segal
May 26, 2018
This interview with Susannah Drake & Rafi Segal was conducted and condensed by frank news. Bight’s project team is Rafi Segal & DLANDstudio (Susannah Drake), Sarah Williams, Greg Lindsay, Brent Ryan, Benjamin Albrecht.
Susannah: My name is Susannah Drake, I'm an architect and landscape architect, and I'm the principal of DLANDstudio. Also, I've taught at various schools including the Cooper Union, which is where Rafi and I met, teaching an Urban Design Studio.
Rafi: I’m Rafi. I’m an architect. I run a practice under my name and I teach at MIT, primarily around the questions of the city, or the future city. I guess you can say I’m an urbanist. The courses bring architects and planners together, which hasn’t been the case in this country since the 1960’s.
How has it been working together?
Rafi: We know where to come together and where to split. This is how we cover ground: we converge and then split.
Susannah: It's respectful but not conciliatory.
Rafi: My work concentrates on urban architecture: the reading, or understanding of the city. How context informs project. Susannah has a broader scope of of dealing with landscape and the environment.
Susannah: The fabric of the city, but also the ecological systems that impact it. Infrastructure acknowledging geology, hydrology, or ecology - to integrate architectural and engineered systems with natural systems.
What is BIGHT?
Rafi: Have you ever heard the term “BIGHT” before?
No.
Rafi: No one has!
Susannah: It could be quite provocative! We should step back and talk about the Regional Plan Association (RPA) and the origins of all of this. The BIGHT project is a component of the Fourth Regional Plan for the future of the metropolitan region: Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. The first plan was about concentric circles of development around Manhattan.
Rafi: This is in 1929.
Susannah: The fourth plan is a dramatic shift: from circles to corridors.
Rafi: The Bight is the waterfronts of Long Island, New York and New Jersey. The barrier islands, harbors, constructed and naturalized landscapes. It comes with a set of issues: climate change, sea level rise, flooding...
How long is it?
Rafi: 600 Miles or so. It’s very big. Let's backtrack for a second to give you a bigger picture. I mean, why do we need such an institution? Why does the RPA exist? The premise back then was, ok, NYC is growing and designing itself, but who's looking at the region? So RPA initially came in to fill the gap with research in urban planning.
Susannah: It’s a national competition, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Rafi: The prompt was, how do you approach urban design of the future? What are the main issues? Who do you engage? What’s the narrative?
Bight City, Jamaica Bay 2067, view across lagoon: ‘wet city’ housing along the lagoon’s edges protects the ‘dry city’ behind it.
Susannah: They wanted to look at different scales of of issues happening in the region. So we looked at a little barrier island, a small community. The we looked at a second area, Jamaica Bay, which is very complex: multi-jurisdictional, also a national park, you know, just about as complex as you can get. And the third area is a post-war suburban community, on a waterfront, but not the same as affluent waterfront areas in Long Island.
THE SITES TODAY
Existing elevated rail, Rockaways, 2017 Sea Bright, New Jersey, 2017: a barrier island flooded from both ocean- and bay sides. The sea wall and elevated beach clubs will remain as the island disappears under water.
PROJECTED VULNERABILITY AND ADAPTATION PLAN
New Mastic, 2050: projected flooding (left), proposed plan for future development (right), densifying high, dry ground while permitting some homes to remain in wet areas as they evolve into a new elevated neighborhood built along docks.
What are the primary climate related issues happening to all of these areas?
Susannah: Sea level rise. They're all in vulnerable areas. Some of them are built on barrier islands, where there really should never have been any development.
It's a dynamic landscape that changes. That is influenced by winds, and currents, and the cycles in the environment, the shifting tides changing the water table. No one should ever build a house there that's permanent, but we have, for recreational purposes or for pleasure. Initially there was a more realistic relationship to the environment in these places. A summerhouse might have been a cottage. It wouldn't be used in the winter. A much lighter touch on the environment. But over time we've changed our relationship to the environment. As people we feel like we're much more invincible. We built hardened structures. But the nature of climate has gotten stronger as our architecture has gotten stronger. And nature's winning now.
Rafi: So we identify a pattern here: that we're building more and more along the coastline, in an area increasingly prone to risk.
How do we work with that and begin a process that requires change? Change is difficult for people to grasp. This was, in a sense, the challenge: not the planning itself, coming up with a smart plan is one thing, but finding a way to communicate and frame an issue is another.
Susannah: We tried to valorize or make positive the idea of retreat. The whole notion of retreat is seen as a pejorative term. It's seen as being fearful, or weak. But look at military strategy. There are times when you need to retreat so you can go back and fight again. You can look at it as poker, sometimes you fold to save resources. So you can keep playing and win.
We came up with a term for a project, a different RPA: receive, protect, adapt. To change the idea of retreat we say received. It’s a proactive development approach to attract people away from the water's edge.
Rafi: To identify areas that can grow, and then use them as anchors.
Sending and receiving blocks: a strategy of switching people and densities over time from high risk areas to dry ground.
Jamaica Bay: projected flooding proposed plan for future development. Flooded ground becomes parks and open water, while dry areas such as JFK are protected and intensified. The result: a new square-toothed “Bight City” comprised of waterside neighborhoods.
There are a lot of maps in the project...
Susannah:
One of the critical discoveries we made along the way happened through mapping. And a recognition of the things we draw and how we draw them.
For instance, Sarah Williams did a tremendous amount of GIS [geographic information system]. She overlaid these maps, and we discovered these development corridors on higher ground. Places with existing right of ways that we could build upon. That didn't get flooded. They were an existing strength... potentially expandable and valuable.
Densifying high ground for New Mastic.
We also mapped infrastructure systems. They were completely disconnected, highlighting the vulnerability of waterfront areas to periodic storm surge, or even longer-term issues like sea level rise. To show a vulnerability but also this opportunity we conceived receive, protect, adapt.
Rafi: There were areas that required protection in terms of the economy or jobs. It’s a very rational approach, also with many strategies.
Of course the communities are considered, but are they directly involved?
Rafi: On various scales. You wouldn’t bring in a community to do large-scale mapping. But you come to that point, and the plan strategies for that.
Susannah: The RPA reached out and engaged with the communities in advance. We had information but limited contact...we did end up giving presentations to some of the mayors.
Who can afford to leave a place like the Rockaways? Some people can’t afford it, and other people might not want to. Their homes are fairly valuable, but they might lose money if they leave. We mapped vulnerability social vulnerability to think about the true definition of afford. To locate housing projects, older people, and those who can’t escape another big storm.
Rafi: And there's only so much one can do on the community scale. Resolution is really at the scale of the city, or the region. When you have risk coming from the ocean, there must be lessons to learn from one town to another.
Who is to bringing all these voices, considerations, and issues together to project a path forward?
You asked what planners and architects do. The urban project is a very difficult one. What will be can really change the city without changing ourselves. We resist change. We are attached to our city our home in an irrational way. Even when risk is evident. It's right in front of our doorstep. You walk out and there’s water instead of land. Even at that point.
So a change in the narrative is key. This country developed from strong narratives. We work on the story now as we go to the future. Whether you believe in climate change or not, the ways we communicate, energy, transportation -- are all changing, and all impact how cities take shape.
Susannah: RPA prompted that Kennedy airport would be strengthened. Elevated and reinforced. An economic hub for the region. And our work should support that.
Rafi: It's a gateway to the country, it’s huge.
View of proposed Gateway Station from the ocean side.
Susannah: The nature and economics of being in the urban center or on the water’s edge have changed. Historically this region depended on trade by water, but the dynamics of trade shifted, and shipping and exchange moved from Lower Manhattan to the periphery.
We transform that line of the water’s edge-- which used to support a physical exchange of goods-- into a zone. Ecological exchange can’t operate along lines, they require these zones.
Gateway Station, Jamaica Bay 2050: a series of plazas and beaches form an intermodal station and recreation center built along the existing elevated rail of the Rockaways.
Rafi: History puts things in perspective. The city is in a constant crisis of change. Are we going to be smarter today then we were in the past? I don’t know.
Why does the average person who doesn’t deal with this every day need to know?
Rafi: That's a great question. You can say that people don't need to know, and government will decide. But that’s not going to happen. Knowing is our strongest ally in a way.
Susannah: It’s important to understand vulnerability but also a way out. To find opportunity in the complexity of retreat.
Is it the government's job to incentivize retreat?
Susannah: Not necessarily with buyouts. We designed an economic development zone. It's upland from of the waterfront zone. You rezone and start development there now, so that in the future city planning and government create incentive just through zoning and shifting development patterns.
“Elevation-Based Zoning” proposes different zoning- and building regulations based on grade elevation to address the risks of storm surges and flooding.
Rafi: In the end it’s our money. You say government, but it’s our money being spent to address issues of flooding.
Susannah: My feeling is that FEMA should be eliminated. FEMA was not intended to be a flood insurance program initially.
Rafi: It will continue like this until they go bankrupt. More hurricanes, more flooding.
It is what it is. But we shouldn’t accept all of these rules. How it always was, isn’t how it has to be.
Rafi: The systems are in place why change.
Susannah: Some of the systems shaped our country in positive ways, some not.
Look at the waterfront in 1982, when Reagan got the Coastal Waters Act signed. If you developed a greenfield on the waterfront, you would not be insured. But if you redevelop land that already has property on it, you got insured. The tax areas were already there.
The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, both signed by Nixon, have been fundamental to the work I do on water quality and climate resilience. Go back further to 1965, when Lyndon B Johnson signed the Highway Beautification Act. It was meant to create more beautiful plantings, but also created better ecologies along those highways.
So this evolution in thinking and perception has actually been positive. But sometimes not particularly altruistic.
The Land Ordinance Grid was a big development scheme to run the country. Gridding completely transformed the American landscape in perpetuity.
To get them to go live in suburban developments. Look at the amount of money made in developing suburbs. They are political decisions that fueled engineering and construction companies.
It’s a big real estate scheme. You want the population to start producing children again, so you get women out of the way. And by the way you can make a shitload of money at the same time. And then...the antidepressant industry.
Bight is currently featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale in the exhibit “Time, Space, Existence,” at the Palazzo Mora.