Climate on Tap: Stories of Remembrance & Restoration

Day 5: Restore

September 02, 2022 Denise Fairchild and Anthony Giancatarino
Climate on Tap: Stories of Remembrance & Restoration
Day 5: Restore
Show Notes Transcript

Restoration looks like a more equitable and just democracy that restores our relationships to one another and the planet. Intersectionality and community are at the heart of restoration.

Guest Speakers:
Denise Fairchild // Emerald Cities Collaborative
Anthony Giancatarino // Strategy Partner, Taproot Earth

Introduction by:
Colette Pichon Battle // Vision & Initiatives Partner, Taproot Earth

Tap into RESTORE by…
Move your body joyfully. Restoration is our birthright. Joy is our birthright.

Connect with us @taprootearth on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

Day five, Restore. As African people, we were not into extracting natural resources. Our focus has been really being in harmony with nature and not taking things that were not just for our basic needs. Day five, day five, day five. Can you believe it Taproot Earth family? Welcome to day five of Climate On Tap, Rituals of Remembrance and Restoration. Today, Taproot Earth's Anthony Giancatarino is talking with the dynamic Denise Fairchild, 2021 Climate Breakthrough Awardee. She's been working for environmental justice for 45 years, a true OG in the space. This conversation centers the necessity of intersectionality in our work, how labor and energy are interconnected and integral to the work for climate change, and the power and possibility of a green economy. Denise's work at Emerald Cities Collaborative is a model for the work in action, and we're honored to work with her as a trusted colleague and friend. Passing the mic to Denise and Anthony. Well, hey Denise, it's good to see you and hear your voice. I know it's been a minute, but thank you so much for joining us for our Taproot Earth launch. Well thank you for inviting me into the conversation, and congratulations on Taproot's launch, it is very important work that you're doing. Before I get into the meat of the conversation around restoration and what that means, I would just love if you could share a little bit about how you actually came into the climate justice space, so what your background was and how that led you to understand climate as a critical place for us to intervene. Yeah. Thank you for that journey. Well, as you know, Anthony, I see myself in the elder status of the movement. I've been around for a very long time, at least 45 years working in economic justice, social justice, environmental and climate justice. And so it's been a a progression. I find myself taking on roles that I didn't even imagine, you know, when I was growing up about what I would be doing. But it really has always been rooted in community. It's always been rooted in addressing issues of injustice. You know, today a lot of our communities are addressing issues of gentrification. When I got started, it was really about divestment and our communities were lacking housing, and we didn't have jobs, and all the stores, you know, retail outlets had left. We had no banks. You know, we had all these predatory commercial outlets in our community. So we've been fighting, I have been fighting that for a very long time, and and actually never really focused on environmental issues. And, in fact, to be honest, fought against environmental issues, because I thought it took away, the issues of birds, and whales, and polar bears, took away from the jobs that we were fighting for, for so long. So I was really a little antagonistic about the growth of the environmental movement until I actually found myself in an environmental justice campaign. I am from, or at least raised my family and lived in, and still live in South Los Angeles, and they were putting a municipal incinerator in our community, spitting distance from our schools, and from our homes, and from our children. And it ended up being a two-year campaign to defeat that incinerator. And so that's when environmental justice hit me right in the face. And it was having to understand what all of these toxic facilities were doing in our communities that, that really threw me into environmental justice work. There was a point in time when I actually read an article, a book actually, that brought my worlds together, that brought my economic justice focus together with my focus on, or my, at that time, anti-focus on the environment. And I saw that if we pushed public and private investments into cleaning up our communities, right, our Superfunds, and our toxic buildings, and all the other nooses in our neighborhoods, our refineries that were spitting distance from where we are, we can actually create jobs. We can create economic opportunities and be healthy, as well as improving the environment. So this merger of economic justice, social justice, and environmental justice came together for me probably back in 2003. But it wasn't until I started working for Emerald Cities in 2010 that I really became intentional about making that connection, about doing what some of us call intersectional work. And then climate, to be honest, climate, the issue of environmental justice, preceded the focus on climate justice because the climate issue didn't really start coming into our awareness until another, maybe, another two or three years afterwards. And so it just recognized that all the things that we had been struggling for could be wrapped around this question of how we're extracting, how our economy is extracting from our communities, how it's extracting from our labor, how it's extracting from our environment, and if we can fix climate and all that's going into destroying man, land, you know, Mother Earth, that we could also address these other issues. So, you know, this is sort of the short version of the long journey that I've been on, but it's been a very blessed and important journey. I thank you for saying that, I've been fortunate to join you for maybe the last 10 years of that journey. And I remember when I was working at the Center for Social Inclusion, we were starting to push the concept of Energy Democracy. And Maya at the time was like,"We need to talk to Denise Fairchild and Emerald Cities." And I think the first time I met you was actually in a gathering in California, maybe at an Energy Democracy Summit in Oakland, there's like a small little— and you were the first, it was Al's— It was Al Weinrub's conference, and your keynote is the first time I heard someone so deeply connect this idea of reclamation and, kind of, reconnecting and reimagining labor and energy systems together. And so I would love to kind of dive in with you a little bit more on that concept of like, we understand this extractive energy systems and extractive labor systems are at the root cause of so many of our issues right now. And you had a clear vision on like,"If we address this, we can solve these issues," that took shape of Energy Democracy. So can you talk a little bit, what it really means for us as communities to restore our relationship to labor and restore our relationship to the energy system? Sure. Thank you for that question. So if I remember correctly, that event, that conference, the local Clean Energy Alliance had me talk about my perspective on energy. And the way I framed it, we'll say I'm a history buff, a history buff related to my history, African American Black history. And I drew an analogy, that what we're trying to do is change an energy system that is, not only as I mentioned before, polluting our environment, but also destroying our health and undermining our communities and our economy. Being able to really dismantle the fossil fuel industry was also analogous to what it took to dismantle slavery. That was the focus of my conversation and understanding that, as slaves we were the pillars of industry at the time. We were the energy source for industry, to grow its cotton, and to be in its factories. When we were replaced by fossil fuel and it's a global economy, a global economy that really does not, again, honor nature, nor does it honor labor as a way of extracting cheap labor, using us for the profiteering of a few number of individuals, for a monopoly industry. That's the framework. And when we imagine, reimagine and restore the world that we want to have, we have to really sort of realign those relationships with energy, which means we realign our relationship to nature, finding Indigenous and Black cultural framing for how we saw ourselves in nature. It's not that as African people, as myself, we were not into extracting Earth. Natural resources. Our focus has been really being in harmony with nature, and not taking things that were not just for our basic needs. Where energy was used for cooking, and it was used to warm our houses, but it was not used for what we call now, "discretionary energy," just the mass consumption, and mass production, and mass accumulation of wealth by the few. So, this notion of restoring is like, let's restore our spirit, and our soul, and our consciousness about the gifts of Mother Nature, and how we respect it because it gives us so much. And how do we restore Mother Nature in a way that is going to honor her contribution and this interdependence that we have with Mother Nature? And so doing that really means also changing our economy, industry work and changing labor in and of itself. And so the idea that we are going to restore the dignity of nature is also about restoring the dignity of workers and labor, and making certain that not only are we producing at a level of sufficiency and not over extracting and polluting the environment, but that we're also honoring our workers in this space, in this green economy. We're now talking not about fossil fuel economy, but a green economy. So what is that economy? What is it? What are the jobs? And how do we make sure that the jobs are not toxic to workers, like the coal industry has been toxic to workers, and creating black lung disease, and really shortening the lives of people that working in these dirty industries. So make sure that even though it's a green industry, that we also are going to care about the health of workers, but that we're also going to make sure that we are paid living decent wages, that we have time-work balance, that we are able to be with our families, and to be in nature and the environment. And so there's a real, really wonderful opportunity that we have as we reimagine the world that we want, to really align the relationships that we have with Mother Earth, and the relationships that we have with labor. And I think that's, again, it's a bit of a challenge 'cause the, you know, the old guard, the status quo is not going to give up its power without a fight, without a struggle. But the thing that keeps me going is imagining what the alternatives can be when we lock arms and work together as a community. We're in that moment right now I think, as we're, we're seeing different policies kind of move through around what is, what can be sacrificed for what gain. One of the things we got to work on together for a couple years was the Energy Democracy Scorecard. I remember in that process, when we were building that out with a bunch of different community partners, there was a good challenge to make sure that we're talking about the re-imagination of energy as spirit and soul, not just of the energy system, and how do we connect it to the different levels of energy? And that's always stuck with me. So when we're thinking about that, like, that allows us to reimagine and live in the future of what we want to see, which is great. And we're also really clear that right now we've got folks in Kentucky who've been overcoming the aftermath of a flood, we still have the industry that does not want to concede its power, really, kind of, taking a lot of pressure on our communities, and people trying to make change, really like pushing folks to the limit. We're in this politically divisive time period, which is really much longer than the last six years, but for the last six years have been very acute. What are your thoughts, or what are your ideas for folks to start making those changes now? Like, how do we actually start making the vision that we all have for a more liberated, just society possible in a moment when people are feeling fractured, stretched, and frankly tired? Yeah, that's the question. We are exhausted, it is exhausting, could be exhausting work because the work has been about fighting the bad. And I think that we need to do that, right, but at the same time, and the work that we've been doing in retreat with a number of amazing thought leaders and activists here in California, is to figure out how we build the new, right, which is, that's what the model of just transition and the hope, you know, the end of the poetry, and the hope, and the vision comes out of the work around building the new. We have to do this in a way that is first building our communities and wherever we are, whatever community we have, we need to have relationships. Well, first, a very strong relationship with ourself to know that we are worthy of a better life, that we're worthy of clean air, and clean water, and access to economic opportunities that are not extractive. And then, knowing that we're worthy, but so are our neighbors. The restoration work really starts like, "We can fight the system, we can fight the man," but we need to, more than anything, put most of our energy in building our communities and developing our own sense of, as we've been talking about here, well-being, and understanding what well-being looks like, and how do we get well-being, and what does, especially in our community, well-beng in our community may be, we've got to clean up this dirty water, or we have to clean up this dirty air, or we need to find a way to get our kids in, you know, a good educational opportunity. But it happens at community. There's nothing that we can do at the system level that does not first start with ourselves, and organizing, and building our power and our relationships, and building our own systems. You know, if the banking system is screwing up, let's create our own banking infrastructure, right? If the food system is failing us, let's create our own food systems. We've got the ingenuity, we have the muscle memory from our ancestors about how to do this stuff. So building the alternative has always been my orientation, and particularly because there's so much cultural appropriation when Black and Brown folks, and land-based, and Indigenous communities do something, it will be appropriated. We are the leaders in this movement for change. We are the leaders that's going to transform us into a new brave world that's going to be cleaner, better, healthier. So let's do it for ourselves. And then in the process, I think we can see that ripple in the pot and see some shifts taking place at a higher level. What do you say to the the youth coming up? So community is won when we are at a time where it's really hard to build community either because of technology and we're all on our phones and our tablets, or because we're in a pandemic, and social distancing is supposed to be the way to protect each other. But do you have recommendations for folks who didn't grow up like you or I, you know, pre-cell phone or— how do you build community, what are recommendations you have for folks to engage, to be able to start that community process? Well, you know, I've been in conversation with— I don't know if they're millennials, I think they're, what's after millennials, Gen Y's?— just these last couple of days, and let me tell you, they've got this, alright? Our young people are going to be the ones that will make the difference. They're engaged in this struggle using their technologies. We just learned something about the, what is it, W3 platform where the young people, it's universal, it is not controlled, you can be as political as you want. They are building communities. They're having parties around this, you know, party with purpose. They're using art. They're using all forms of cultural expression to take their, sort of, their awareness and their knowledge about how this world has not been in service of humanity, it has not been in service of the environment, and they're developing their own futures. I'm not sure that we got to tell them anything. I think they're in a position where they're teaching us how to come along in a new space. They're telling us where their spaces are, and they're telling us,"You guys can come into this, you can be a part of this." It's just, we don't even know that those spaces exist. And we need to find ways to amplify and support those spaces that they're creating for themselves, and to be in conversation with them on an inter-generational level to make sure that we're at least passing on, you know, not our struggles, but our knowledge about what the struggles are, and our vision of what we have always wanted for them and for others. So young folks got this, and that is my sense of hope for the future because of what I see happening in their communities. You know, are there any particular practices that you would want to share, or recommendations for folks around how do we actually practice restoration? Do you want to share out to the world as a good starting point? Well, thank you for the question. I think we restore ourselves by reconnecting, reconnecting to nature, first and foremost, and to begin to see nature not as something that is distant or apart from us, but that you know, that we are one with nature. And that biking, right, you know, walking, going out fishing, being quiet, meditative, is sort of what the restoration process requires, is that we are busy. We're busy people. We're constantly going to meetings, and we're taking care of our kids, and you know, putting food on our table, and being busy makes it very difficult for us to restore the essence of who we want to be. And I think COVID has shown us a little bit about, what's made us go crazy in some regards, and has been detrimental to many of our communities, the notion of stopping and being with family and being in relationship with community, has been sort of eye opening. And this notion of the "Great Quit," the "Great Resignation," where people have, once they've stopped, they said, "Oh, my goodness, I can do this," you know, "Why am I on this treadmill, just going faster and faster and faster?" So be quiet, be still. Be in the now, read a book, smell the roses. It's as simple as that. It is how we create the simple life for ourselves and for our communities, where the notion of abundance and sufficiency, you know, replaces ideas of we gotta make money, and we gotta, you know, be productive, and all the things that, the Western cultural values, that are undermining our society. That's beautiful. Thank you, Denise. Thank you for taking the time today, speaking of busy people, you are one of the busiest folks. But I also do know that you take time to, to walk, and hike, and smell the roses, as you said. But thank you for joining us on this launch, and looking forward to many more years ahead working with you. And I look forward to working with Taproot and all of you guys, what you guys are doing. Thanks, Denise, and congratulations for continuing to be a global leader in this fight. What role in the Liberation Symphony are you playing? Will you be a connector like Anthony, or a builder like Denise? What role will you play to restore the community and the natural world? As per Denise's invitation, get out and smell the roses. Tap into Restore by moving your body joyfully. Restoration is our birthright. Joy is our birthright. And connect with us at @TaprootEarth on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook using the hashtag #ClimateOnTap. We'd love it if you share Climate On Tap with your people. Send them this episode, or invite them to sign up for the series.