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
How Change Happens
by Duncan Green
September 25, 2018
Duncan Green is Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB and author of How Change Happens and From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World. He also authors the From Poverty to Power blog.
frank: I want to talk to you about what you've written about a lot, which is how to be an effective activist.
Duncan: Malcolm Gladwell wrote some really interesting stuff off the back of the Arab Spring a few years ago. He was saying, look, the people who really bring about change have deep bonds of trust. They go into scary situations together and face them. Those bonds tend to be built face-to-face, having gone to school with people or having been in organizations with people. More than the quite thin bond you create on Instagram. One thing is that you need to build up that personal network of people you trust, and who you're willing to work with and occasionally take risks with. And that means getting out of the house.
frank: Once you establish that sort of personal connection, how do you scale from there?
Duncan: The book talks a lot about the idea of power. How do you understand power? I find it really helpful when I look at that sort of process that you just described to think, "well, there's a process of power within." People feeling effective, thinking that they have rights, a light bulb moment's come on in the heads of people who are often quite downtrodden, when they suddenly stand up and say,
Where they're going to scale is to unify, to find people who have similar views to yours, or are in similar situations to yours, and learn to work with them, which is not easy. But what you get by working together is irreplaceable.
frank: Do you think there's a way to cross over from NGO work to policy and government?
Duncan: A couple of points on that. The book argues that activism is not just about being a protestor on the streets. It includes that, but it's actually anybody who's trying to bring about change in their context, in the institution they work in, in the situation they find themselves in. That's because I started to find repeat patterns in terms of how people bring about change.
If you're trying to change the world through a private company, through an NGO, through a mass organization, you're actually looking at similar rhythms, similar tactics, you're asking yourself the same questions about, "Who are my allies? Who are my opponents? What tactics might help strengthen the allies, weaken the opponents?" It's the same.
frank: You mention activists need to become reflectivists. Can you explain that term?
Duncan: This is part autobiography [laughter]. I started off as an angry activist. Lots of things to be angry about. When I was starting, it was what was going on in Central America, it was the U.S. funding a really nasty war in Nicaragua. A lot of the activism was about protest! It was about saying, "this is wrong." And, in a way, that's cathartic, and it might make a difference, but I never really thought about how this protest was likely or unlikely to bring about any kind of change. It was much more of an expression of outrage. Over time, I got more impatient.
When you're trying to do more insider influencing, you tend to work in different ways. It's not all about numbers on the street. It's about contacts, and language, and ways of doing things. People try and change the system from the inside, and from the outside.
Outsiders will be numbers on the street. Protest movements in civil society is a big part of the work I've looked at. I've worked with a lot of those organizations, I've been in those organizations. Then there's an insider track of people who are trying to get meetings with ministers, or trying to get meetings with officials, trying to come up with the kind of evidence that might persuade them doing pieces of research. There's an uneasy relationship between the insiders and the outsiders. If you're an insider, if you're trying to get a company to worry more about the labor standards in its supply chain, in the factories that produce its goods, it's great to have protests. It's great to have outsiders putting pressure on the company, so the company talks to you.
My rule of thumb is that insiders, if they're sensible, love outsiders. Outsiders have a much more ambivalent attitude to insiders, because if you're an outsider, and you're doing a protest, and you want to keep things clear, you don't want to have all these people messing up, coming up with compromises, making things halfway okay. That really messes with your campaign. The outsiders are sometimes more hostile to insiders. Insiders are usually quite happy about the outsiders. It's kind of asymmetric.
frank: Do you think it's a mistake for outsiders to be hostile towards insiders?
Duncan: It depends what your purpose is. If your purpose is to bring about change, I would say yes it is a mistake, because that combination of insider and outsider is ultimately very effective. If your actual purpose is to mobilize as many people, and make them really angry and get them to join your party, or whatever it is you're trying to do, then it does mess things up. So it's a sign, really, of what's actually motivating people.
There is also a political difference, sometimes, which is that the outsiders are kind of maximalists. They want really transformational, big change. They want to get rid of capitalism. If you've got an insider who is making capitalism a bit nicer, that actually makes it harder to get a big change. So, there are political reasons for the differences, as well as motivational ones.
frank: Are there any movements at the moment that you think are really successful, that are doing a good job at not only provoking more thought, but also enacting real change?
Duncan: There's loads. But, I'll talk about one which is really close to home, which is an organization in London, in the U.K. called Citizen's U.K. I love it because it's really different from Oxfam, and the kind of NGOs that were. It is a community-based organization based on the same principles that Obama applied when he was learning his trade in Chicago all those years ago. It's got the same kind of intellectual gurus. And, they work. They basically go around to poor communities working in particular with faith institutions (mosques, churches, synagogues), and with schools. And, they ask people what their problems are. You know, "What's pissing you off?"
But, the reason I know about this is partly because my son works for them, so...
frank: Amazing!
Duncan: Just full disclosure there. He's set up something in one part of London, and they were working with local groups to clean up parks, and to get changes in planning, and to get social housing, and all sorts of things. I love that approach because it's so different from online activism, and it respects the institutions that poor people trust, which is faith organizations and things that matter to them as families, like schools, and starts from there, and I think that's really interesting.
frank: Community based that goes macro from the micro, it seems.
Would you expand more on the kinds of power you define in your work?
Duncan: When people talk about power, they often mean the formal political power who is actually in the government, or who has got the guns and runs the army. That leads you to think that power is a bad thing. I think far too many people go with that line that power corrupts...Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In order to actually change anything, you need power. That's why the book argues that we need to be a bit more nuanced and thoughtful about power. One way of thinking about it is there is formal power. The people who are sitting in the government making decisions. Then, there's hidden power, which is old boy networks, the backrooms, the lobbyists, the people you don't see who sort of seem to influence events. Then there's invisible power, which is actually the power in people's heads, it's close to that "power within" idea. Why do some people think that they're entitled to run the country, and, loads of us, think, "Oh, no, what do we know?" And that kind of thing.
You need to confront those less obvious forms of power if you're actually going to create change. There's lots of different ways of looking at power, but overall I've found, say to people, "Look, power is like this force field, which permeates society. And, most processes of change involve a change in that force field whereby some people get more power, some people get less." The nature of power shifts, so if you're going to become serious about change, you have to make power visible and then try and act upon it.
I think there's lots of different tools for making power visible, and that invisible-hidden-visible is one way.
frank: We're at a particular moment now where more and more people feel an urge towards activism. How do you push people who have no history of activism to participate beyond a march, beyond a like...?
Duncan: There's really interesting studies over centuries about social movements. How do these movements come? They suddenly spike, and then they disappear again. We've got one of those at the moment. We've got the #MeToo, Black Lives Matter. There's a lot of these big, upsurging movements. All of them, when you look at them, they're made up of little grains. They're not amorphous blobs, they've got structure.
Those grains are actually more long-lasting groups of people. It's faith groups, churches, mosques. It's trade unions, it's sports clubs, all sorts of things! Suddenly, they all come together and they make a big noise, and you think, "Oh where did that come from?" When it settles down again, they go back to their grains.
I think one answer to your question is...I am getting to an answer to your question...one answer to your question is, look at your own life and see where are you in a grain? Where are you in a sports club, or a cultural group? Where have you got social capital? Because that might be a place where you should become active.
If you're a parent to your kids at school, and if you're in a faith organization, if you're a believer in some religion, whatever it is, any of those could become big, whereby you're not alone. I'd say my advice would be think about doing that, not just doing the online petition.
frank: Is there anything at the moment you feel really urgent about? Anything you think people need to be taking into consideration but aren't?
Duncan: It comes back to that point you picked up earlier, we need to be activists and reflectivists. I think one of the aspects of reflection, which I think we need to get much better at, is spotting where things are working in our environment.
If you're concerned about the environment, getting better at seeing where people are doing the right thing for the environment, and then trying to ask, "Why?" There's a whole field of work called positive deviance, which looks at where things are unexpectedly good. I think especially now, we should be consciously looking for these positive outliers, these unexpectedly good results on any given issue, and seeing what we can learn from those.
The reason I like that is because it shows some respect for the people and systems who generate solutions. They're not always waiting for the great, white savior to come in and solve it. It might well be my next book, this positive deviance aspect, because I think it's got fantastic potential as a way of reading about change.