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
Being Not-Rich with Lauren Schandevel
by Lauren Schandevel
May 15, 2019
This interview with Lauren Schandevel, creator of Being Not-Rich at UM, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Tatti: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Lauren: I am a 4th year public policy student at the University of Michigan. Most of my work has centered around college affordability in particular. About a year ago, I crowdsourced the Being Not-Rich at UM document, which was a great resource for low income students. It was also a place to come together and realize other people were experiencing the same things, and help each other out. That's the thing that launched my career doing housing and food insecurity work on campus. I've met a lot of students on other campuses that are doing similar work. It's been really exciting.
Why did you start the doc?
The document itself is just a Google document with the sharing settings tweaked so that anyone can make suggestions or leave comments. It was crowd sourced in response to an affordability guide that our Central Student Government put out about a year ago that has some pretty tone deaf advice about budgeting – low income students were put off or offended by it. This was a response to that with substantial advice that low income students could use without the stigma or added judgment of having that advice come from an institutional figure.
Initially it was just an outline. I put the introduction in first, setting the tone for what the document would be. And then I had headings – housing, employment, on campus resources, food – people just filled in the information as they came in. Now it's grown to about a hundred pages. Before it was just a couple pages, like a skeleton outline.
What was so tone deaf on an institutional level that prompted you to start this yourself?
I think it's important to start by talking about how students perceive Central Student Government at the University of Michigan. They release reports on their demographic information each year and they're usually wealthier and less racially diverse than the rest of the student body. People already have that perception of them. When they put out the guide, the first 10 pages or so were devoted to budgeting, a lot of the advice was like, “fire your maid”, or, "stop laundry service".
That was the main issue we took with it. It wasn't like we were spending our money frivolously and that's why we were struggling. It's that we don't have a lot of money to begin with, and it's hard to live on the University of Michigan's campus.
Did you send the doc to student government or to anybody on an institutional level?
The university administration knows that it exists and certain departments like the Office of New Student Programs have collaborated with me to turn it into a more institutional thing. I chaired the Central Student Government affordability task force this year and they're going to have an affordability commission permanently from now on. So that's great.
One thing I've noticed is a lot of the time it's students taking the initiative, particularly on our campus. Students are doing most of the housing and food security work. That should not be the case. The university should take responsibility, especially in the instance of housing. They're admitting more students than they have housing for, and it's on them to build housing and make sure students have a place to live when they get to campus.
Food insecurity is the same. We just got a permanent food pantry. But a lot of that was because of student activism over the years. We shouldn't be the ones pushing the university on basic needs, particularly because low income students have a million other things to worry about.
Do you think the work is moving towards that goal?
I think it's moving in that direction, not just here but nationally. The Hope Center in Philadelphia has been at the forefront of these discussions about housing and food insecurity on college campuses. They've published a lot of reports, they hold an annual conference. People are becoming more attuned to these issues and the fact that they exist on college campuses.
How does the wealth gap you're recognizing affect students socially?
I feel like that is part of the conversation that's often ignored. Obviously there are financial barriers to being a low-income student on a college campus. But there's also, like you said, a social aspect. Students arrive on campus and feel alienated from their peers, and don't understand why. A lot of it is because of that socioeconomic disparity – but they don't realize it.
It happens frequently and it's a huge reason why those students end up dropping out – because of a lack of the sense of belonging. I myself have felt that way, and I know a lot of my peers have too. The important thing is letting those students know that it's completely out of their control. It's a structural problem, and any sort of alienation they feel from their peers as a result of those socioeconomic barriers are not because they're not good enough for a university.
How can you can mitigate the social part of the problem?
I think low income and first generation college students need more community building spaces. I know first-gen activism has taken off over the last 10 years. You have offices for first-gen programming and first-gen learning communities, which is really great. The same thing should be done for low-income students on college campus’ so they can talk to each other and share experiences and realize that they're not alone in this college experience. University administrations need to recognize they have low-income students on their campus because it's a very touchy subject for them right now.
Acknowledging that it is a socioeconomic thing is probably the first step. Particularly in America, we don't talk about class. And so when we gravitate towards certain people, we don't know that it's because they share our socioeconomic background. They don't know that diversity also includes socioeconomic diversity. I feel like naming that issue and making it clear that a lot of the decisions we make are the results of our socio economic backgrounds will make it easier for people to see the class disparities in higher education, and it will hopefully empower low income students to advocate for themselves and to feel confident enough to participate in the college experience so that they're meeting different people, people who might be wealthier than themselves.
Do you feel like this perpetuates itself into the post-collegiate professional world?
Yes. It's a combination of financial and cultural factors. Wealthy students coming in have parents who have probably gone to college, that have careers where they can get the students internships or fellowships, and pay for them to do unpaid internships. There's that aspect of it. But then there's also that cultural capital. Those students know what clubs to join, they know where to apply, and they have connections somewhere. That trajectory is already set for them. Whereas low-income students can't afford to do unpaid internships, don't know anyone in the industry, don't know how to navigate the process of applying to those internships, or even that they have to do internships in college.
When do we need to start preparing students for these realities of college campuses?
This is one of the issues I have with college affordability activism – it starts way before students enter college. The K-12 education system is so vastly unequal, that needs to be addressed in addition to how we're setting up low-income students to succeed in college. There's so many low-income students we're not capturing because our education system is so unequal. It's a rare phenomenon to even get low-income students in the door at these elite institutions.
That needs to be addressed. But that’s a combination of segregation and the way public schools are funded. There are a number of legal ways in which rich parents give their kids a leg up in the admissions process.
Does your academic focus cover these issues?
Yes, I try to make that really clear. I am also responsible for creating a minor and social class in equality studies at the university. It basically teaches about how social class influences outcomes and access to opportunity.
That's something I tried to bring into my activism around affordability because affordability is inherently political, and to talk about it you also have to talk about class and race and all that stuff.
Class is a very un-American conversation.
Exactly. People are starting to have that conversation.
Do you find it easy to explain?
Oh, it's so hard. Particularly if you're communicating it to wealthy people, which a lot of the times I'm doing because of the campus. But telling people that their success is the result of the combination of hard work and privilege is really hard, and people get defensive. You have to coddle them a little and say, "You worked really hard in high school, but have you considered that these factors may have helped you get to a place like the University of Michigan?" And then they get it, but sometimes they're still mad because the American dream tells us that if you work hard you can succeed – and it doesn't say anything about class privilege.
What do you think happens to the value of college when the reality of attendance is so tied to privilege? As an employer, what does it really mean to hire someone from Yale, if I have no context for how they got there?
People are still under the impression that if you went to one of these very elite schools, you must be very smart and that's how we maintain the system. But if people start to think that, hey, maybe this is the result of socioeconomic privilege and not necessarily merit, then the only solution to keeping people from losing faith in the education system is to admit students in a truly meritocratic way, which means admitting very smart, high performing low-income students. Hopefully the problem solves itself that way. But if not, then we're going to have this distrust of higher education.