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
A Vision for Art in the 22nd Century
by frank
October 6, 2018
Dustin Yellin is the Founder of Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn and contemporary artist living in New York.
This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news at the Clocktower Studio.
frank: What does access mean for you, as far as this physical space and access to art in Brooklyn and around the world that you're providing?
Dustin: There is very much a proclivity in our society at the moment to modify learning, education and cultural production, so that's something that I think we are reacting to here. Pioneer Works is admission free, so all three floors of the building are completely free to the public. We expect about a million people to come through the doors in the next five years. 87% of our programming is free. I think that culture should be free. I think that the commons should still exist in our society and due to the modification of education and experience, as we've seen in so many different ways, that this ceasing to exist more and more in our country and so we want to fix that by creating a center for the sciences and for the arts that's accessible to everyone and building bridges into different parts of society that don't have that kind of access or exposure.
That's what Pioneer Works is – sort of a beta, a scalable 22nd century center for community anywhere. We'd like to build a micro Pioneer Works in shipping containers and put it down in refugee camps in Jordan and in townships in South Africa. We'd like to see Pioneer Works in Detroit, in Akron, in Oakland. We're looking at what does it take to build a new commons, a new center for community that could be in every neighborhood, a new place that's admission free and accessible everywhere. If you think about the future of cities and you're building a city from scratch, obviously you've got to build whatever the future version of a hospital is and a school is, but I also think that there should be the commons, there should be a place that everyone in the neighborhood can go, admission free, and get access to culture, to science, to learning if you will.
Is that the mission of Pioneer works then?
Dustin: The mission of Pioneer Works is to build community through arts and sciences to realize our human potential. We fulfill our mission at Pioneer Works by transcending disciplines and creating universal access to the arts and sciences to realize true social change.
And how does the internet play into this?
Dustin: We're building what I call responsible, digital echo, which is how you tear down the walls, the physical of what we're doing here and build. It took me a long time to come around to that because I love the analog, but how do you share, if you will, public brain trust of all these people that are coming through our campus with people around the world, so we're doing that by developing podcasts, music videos, digitizing the hundreds of articles that we publish, making it all available online.
Why do you want this, why are you doing this?
Dustin: I think that truly on our planet that socioeconomic inequality, geopolitical instability and division, religious division, division of humanity through these different schisms, is getting more and more amplified by our current political and economic structures. And I think that the antidote to that is art and science. I think the arts and sciences are the greatest agency we have, or glue, to bring people together. It's the one thing we have that gets everyone to a table unarmed. Whether they're Jewish and Palestinian, black and white, rich and poor; it doesn't make a difference. They're all gonna come around a fire, around a song, around a film, around a story. So how do we use storytelling to bring people together? That's why I'm doing this.
And how do we scale that storytelling and how, more importantly, perhaps, do we make that accessible to everyone? It shouldn't just be in a place that costs 25 dollars for entrance or two million dollars to buy a painting, or it shouldn't be about the fiscal piece, it should be about the learning and the curiosity and the wonder.
So, what's the greatest connectivity between the arts and the sciences? What's the greatest, best thread between the two?
Dustin: That's a hard question because I don't necessarily differentiate them. A lot of my friends who play music are also scientists or my friends who are scientists play music, or you know, there's different sort of philosophical discourse around scientific method and perhaps what we do when we make a painting or an experiment. But on a personal level, I just see nothing and something. I think that everything's invented, that civilization is an invention – that everything that we see, everything we experience, we've created. Therefore, it's hard for me to differentiate, if we're looking at mechanisms to make clean energy, or to build new types of buildings or to go to space, or under the ocean, or whatnot. I don't differentiate these things, I think they all inform each other.
So what are your greatest barriers to creating this?
Dustin: Unfortunately they're probably fiscal. It's that I have to run around like a crazy person and get the support we need to build the staff we need, to facilitate the programs that we're doing, so that for me is challenging cause I'd rather be writing or making art, or thinking, or, so you know, that amount of socialization of the ideas for support for the ideas opposed to the actual implementation of the programming, is challenging.
How do you think we can use art and science to better form the electorate?
Dustin: That's tough, probably because, well it'll inform it because our entire political system probably has to be reconstructed to a post-industrial, post-internet society and there hasn't really been an update to the operating system of our political structures. So, I would think that technology, science and the arts, as a storytelling tool, will help to build that new connective tissue; to rethink the way government works at this scale.
And you think, what specifically will help that? Besides a total breakdown in our system and a rebuilding.
Dustin: I always ask people, what are the three most pressing issues facing humanity. And I usually get the same three answers, which are: socioeconomic inequality, the ecological disaster that we are straight, smack at the beginning of and in the middle of, and then we can go out further, right, and we can talk about the nuclear issue, and we can talk about the potential of AI, and all these different scale problems facing humanity. But I actually think all those things are, that we can solve for all those things if we work together. But we can't work together as Americans and Chinese; we have to work together as a species, and so again the arts and sciences are maybe our greatest tool to humanize humanity again.
When we look at cycles of terror and violence, one of the first targets in those moments is art. Why?
Dustin: Because art is a tool to give voice to change, and therefore if there are systems of control and position, and therefore that can jeopardize those systems. I'm one of those folks that's just looking ahead, so I'm not gonna, yeah, we could you know...
So access is about the future, not about the past?
Dustin: I think we learn from the past, to tell stories that will inform the future.