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.
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 thesis presentation deck
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 thesis presentation deck
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 towillingly 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
Money Alone Is Not Enough
by Michelle Miller-Adams
May 10, 2019
This interview with Michelle Miller-Adams, a professor and senior researcher at the Upjohn Institute, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Part One of this conversation is available here.
When you look at and consider all of your research over the years, what is your ideal version of 'free college' programs? And how do you push what you know and what you're curious about to the forefront of our national conversation around college affordability?
As we enter another presidential primary, what would you like the conversation to look like? What do you think the most critical debate around this issue should be?
That is another great question, and actually, I'm about to start thinking seriously about it, because I'm about to write a book on this topic.
While I hope the ideas in my book will influence the national discourse, I'm not holding my breath for a national program, because I just think that politically, it's a really tough lift. If you look at the history of policy innovation in our country, this is exactly how it happens. Things get pioneered at the local level, and then they spread to other local communities, and then they may jump up to the states, and then maybe eventually, they'll find their way into federal policy. I just think that even though all the Democrats are talking about this, once they get in power, and depending who winds up in the Congress, a nationwide free-college program is not a surefire outcome.
That being said, we had a proposal in 2015 from President Obama that made a great deal of sense. To me, it's still the gold standard model out there for triangulating all of those various needs. It was called America's College Promise – no legislation was ever introduced but the policy proposal was out there. It was a federal-state partnership that would make community colleges tuition free. If states opted to participate–- and there were performance requirements if they did – the federal government would foot most of the bill. And importantly, it was designed to be a first dollar program.
That leads me to your question. I especially value programs that have universal eligibility. Basically, in programs like these, everybody can take a crack at it.
In a perfect world, which we don't live in, a first dollar program is far preferable to a last dollar program, because it has that better equity impact, where low-income students also get new money, and then they can use their Pell Grants to pay part of the way of their living expenses. If you do a universal program, and you focus it on community colleges, as Obama's program did and as Tennessee and Rhode Island do – whether first- or last-dollar – you are doing some de facto targeting. You are targeting low and moderate-income students, because honestly, Tatti, do you know many wealthy students who went to community college?
Very few.
Right. There may be a few, but that might just be the price you pay. If an affluent student is headed toward an elite or even semi-elite four-year institution, they're probably not going to make the decision to go to community college to get their $2,000 a year scholarship. On the other hand, students who weren't necessarily going anywhere, or those at the margin who are stressed in terms of finances, may decide to go to community college, and students on a four-year track may decide to start at the community college and cut their costs dramatically. Students do that all the time. I teach at a large state university, and we have plenty of students who started at a community college because it's cheaper – and then transfer to the four-year school to get their bachelor's.
Two other things are really important. One powerful lesson that we have learned over the years is that simplicity is your ally in these programs. With complex programs there's just too much confusion around the messaging. New York State has a program called the Excelsior Scholarship, and it's really innovative in one sense, which is that it allows students to go to public four-year institutions, as well as two-year community colleges, which is great. However, there is so much fine print that very few students actually qualify for the scholarship.
The simpler the better. If you can say it in a couple sentences, that's a good sign. But the other important element is this question of support. Thinking seriously about what kinds of resources are needed all along that educational continuum to help students, particularly those who haven't been successful in school, access higher ed, be successful in getting there, staying there and completing is really important.
Tennessee Promise has a mentorship program, and while the mentorship component is not as intensive as it was for the predecessor local program, it marks a recognition of the value of mentorship in helping students be successful in higher ed. Tennessee also has an adult free community college program called Tennessee Reconnect, and even that has a support structure built in. It doesn't come out of public money. It comes out of the philanthropic sector. There are a lot of ways to do this, but it's important to recognize that the money by itself is not going to change your outcomes that much.
As a short digression, I've been really busy, so I haven't been very active on Twitter, but I do want to respond to Pete Buttigieg's response…
He was pretty negative about free college. He basically said there's this huge college wage premium, where people with college degrees get paid a lot more than people who don't, and that's absolutely true. And he doesn’t like the idea of people without college degrees subsidizing those who are going to get the college wage premium. I think he misses the boat on this. The point of Promise programs is to bring those people who aren’t headed for college – whether because of confusion about the process or lack of financial resources – into the process so they can go on and get some of that college wage premium. Right?
Another presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren, has come out with a number of big equity-based policy ideas and one of the latest is her plan for tuition-free college and student loan debt relief. Her ideas are bold and not always fully practical, but this one had an important element, which is that if we're going to make public colleges and universities tuition free, we had better also address the student loan burden. One of the challenges of free college is that if you come up with a national program, you still have all these people walking around with this huge student loan debt. So there's a real equity challenge there, if you aren't going to do something about the people who already got indebted, then it's sort of just a generational unfairness.
We're having that discussion in Michigan. Our new governor, just this week, introduced legislation for three tuition-free college initiatives, one for community colleges, one for four-year publics and one for adults, closely modeled on Tennessee, but there's no component that deals with the student debt situation, and the legislation. Because we have this very Republican Congress it's probably not going to go very far, but we'll see.
It’s a fascinating aspect of the free-college movement. A lot of money is being committed to support free-college initiatives without a lot of evidence about what they do and don’t accomplish. I know that because we sit here at ground zero of trying to generate some of that evidence, and there are many, many, many things we do not know. This is not a heavily researched, proven model where we really understand what we're doing.