First it was a sign. With a cartoon looking tree and the words, “Save Mozino Forest.” We stumbled upon it on our walk. One of at least two to three a day with our husky and strolling baby. We take turns hand in navy leash or pushing the first baby item we purchased at REI on sale way back when I was ten weeks pregnant.

On the sign there is a QR code. I scan it. Fifteen acres of forest zoned for development. Housing primarily, plus retail. Another 143 homes, likely a nail salon, maybe a pilates studio, throw in a Wawa across the expressway from another Wawa.

Development is always portrayed as a good thing. Inevitable even. Progression must include development. Development is progression is growth is good. God bless America. The end.

I already know the argument Mayor Brown and the developer will make at the council meeting - “We need more homes and jobs, do you want to take that away from the community, that economic lift?”

As I stand in the lobby between the elevators and the packed council meeting with Gabe, River and other residents wearing green, watching the screen and reading the delayed transcription from residents that speak up, I whisper to Gabe, someone needs to say what doesn’t make us look like a bunch of white liberals who will tie ourselves to a tree. I can feel the dissonance between the greens and the suits. The forced composure of the council, counting down the time until they can relax into authenticity.

Gabe leans in, “That one guy’s not into it all, so antsy.” We watch as he fidgets and looks the least interested in what feels perhaps performative. The residents are speaking factually and from the heart, no performance, and yet this is a routine procedure positioned at the end of a workday. It’s already 8pm. People are exhausted. The roles are clear. People come to voice concerns and complaints - like the last remaining forest in a township proposed to be bulldozed or the rats on a street. The council listens. And is supposed to do something about it. So far, only the rat comment was immediately addressed by the mayor.

As a new homeowner, for the first time I get why nature is scary. Who wants a ginormous hundred year old hundred foot tall sycamore falling on their home during a microburst with winds of hundred miles per hour. Since living in Pennsylvania for two years, I’ve seen oak trees fifty feet tall ripped up by the roots during, what felt like, a Wizard of Oz dark swirling tornado made worse and more frequent by the warming climate. Cutting down nature’s natural carbon sequesters, oxygen providers and building more impermeable surfaces, will of course only warm the climate further creating more Wizard of Oz tornados. And yet if a tree fell onto River’s room while he was sleeping, I’d lose my mind. Safer to bulldoze and plant a shrub.

What about the homes that already live in the forest? Our neighbors the deer. I watch through the glass doors a mother nursing her two spotted fawns as I nurse River, just before they eat our not yet planted hydrangeas, and I let them. Because the beauty of a wild animal being itself in our suburban increasingly screen oriented world is breathtaking. I never want to lose this. The excitement in which Gabe will be pooping and calls me over to the bathroom window to look at the entire family resting in what was allocated as our property.

Our mornings begin with the call to prayer by chickens, hawks and crows. Our neighbor built a chicken coop that could be Airbnbed. It’s that nice. A hawk routinely perches at the top of a barren tree claiming temple. Crows in the morning remind me, always, of waking up in Hearthaven.

Just a few minutes on our back patio and all of us accrue multiple itchy mosquito bites. We can’t control everything for comfort. I need this pesky physical reminder of our place in the biosphere.

The Mozino forest is part of our watershed. Collen Brook flows into Darby Creek and the woods support a designated FEMA flood zone. How silly it would be to cut down our carbon sequesters, oxygen providers, habitats for wildlife, climate resilient, flood resilient ecology that also looks and feels good for recreational use and instead fill in the topography with landfill to raise and even the land, build pretty shooty cheap houses with laminate flooring call it luxury, increase traffic tenfold, increasing the idling cars, increasing emissions, increasing the warming climate, build a whole new school because the existing ones are full, build a hospital because there isn’t adequate health services to fit the needs of the population, more traffic, more accidents, more health care visits, more economic strain.

Not long after the council meeting, an inspector tells us our home, the one we just bought, is sinking. Slouching. And he slouches his shoulders, hangs his head, gesturing to the posture of our house. “Nature wants to destroy your home,” he says. The soil shifting and expanding. The water moving, resting inside the structure of our shelter. Water is as insidious and detrimental to a home as this administration is to our planet. I am becoming obsessed with the cracks, any sign of moisture, the fuzzy small off white slightly pick circle forming in the crease of the ceiling behind the wood stove. I lose five hours of sleep the night he tells us the foundation is settling in all different directions.

Nature is no longer just something I choose to immerse myself in to enjoy. Write poetry about and refer to as my god. It’s now also something that I’m up against.

While writing this I take an afternoon stroll with baby and dog. I see a woman crouched down at one of those “Save the Mozino Forest” signs at the entrance to the Collenbrook historic farm, writing something with a black sharpie. The ink over the sign reads, “Thank you!!!!! Council”.

Gabe googles, “Council voted to table the CMU (commercial mixed use) ordinance and the developer is looking to sell.” Maybe the council wasn’t as annoyed as I projected. A developer is always around the corner knocking on the tree trunk door but for now we have some time.

I watch River move from mastering the army crawl on all fours to lifting himself onto knees to balancing himself on his feet. We are seeing the micro version of millions of years in evolution unfold in our home, from a four legged to two legged, he’s quickly becoming a vertical ape-human.

The gift I give my son is simply to watch and let him crawl-climb all over me. Not run around doing chores when there is plenty to do, not over program our day, not perform or entertain him with gadgets and games, not scroll on the phone while he tinkers, but sit in stillness with attention and let him freely play on and around me. For development to be sustainable - does it feel something like this? Secure base, organic time in growth, and as the adult, our most promising position is to be of witness? Action proceeding from a place of active observation and connection.

Gabe says “I know you’re worried, I love our home, just not the mosquitoes.” It’s true. There’s the part that says yes mosquitoes put us in our place as pesky humans thinking we can dominate nature and there’s the part of me that screams with frustration while picking off miniscule ticks from our husky’s paws and getting my ankles and elbows bit that says fuck you mosquitoes. Fuck you ticks. An increasing population of course with a warmer, more humid climate. What part of this natural thing - is our doing?

Gabe cleans out the sunroom, bright green 70s Danish tile floor no longer cluttered by construction tools. I move in my father’s chair that he made in college. Maple or is it mahogany, midcentury inspired, tall upholstered back and stool as if I am sitting at the base of a tree with my legs stretched out on the soil. For the first time since we moved in, I sit under the warm toned solar powered string of lights surrounded by redwood, pine, sycamore, holly, linden, listening to the night sounds of the woods. It’s everything I’ve wanted. And it’s terrifying.

Perhaps this dichotomy is the live experiment of growing up.

Sustainability never really was about checking green boxes.

Circling in the sand repeating thank yous. Tickling myself in partnership with the wind.

Sustainability was always an extension in practice of my most intimate relationship. The one with my surrounding environment. A felt experience through the sensations of nature’s goodies, weeping willow whistling, sun on skin after a rainy weekend, poppies popping orange and red at the corner house during morning stroll with my baby. It’s through these sensational experiences that I felt/feel a connection to some amorphous “You”.

A mortgage lender asked me recently “And ah your previous job, it relates to your current one?” Oh you mean does the Assistant Professor of sustainable systems at Parsons relate to the Director of Parish Life at Swarthmore Presbyterian Church? Yeah, no not on paper. “I mean it’s not like you went from driving a bus in NYC to being a chef in PA right?” Well, I’m good at programming and community stuff.

Years ago, I was called a Pagan by an evangelical Christian from Ghana when I was ritualizing on the beach in Coffee Bay, South Africa. But I don’t think I’m a good Pagan in the traditional sense. I don’t have a relationship with Runes or Nordic gods or tarot cards or astrology. But I do wear big pendants and flowy clothing.

I’ve never read the Bible even though I went to seminary. (Shhh, don’t tell anyone). As an outsider, it appears to be a compilation of stories. Stories I could never really grip on to. The stuff around the text, the space for one person to speak while another is listening in fellowship, when there isn’t a rush, but there is routine. The physicality of meeting in a house with history and designating time for something both within us and not just about us. I like that.

The amorphous You showed up in writing from very early on. It was a being in the tree when I would sing by myself, hand to bark, not alone in our backyard growing up. The You has rectified any sense of prolonged loneliness across my growing lifetime.

In New York, less trees, more people, I’d still feel a lifting You embodied in the person next to me on a bench recovering from whatever ails them. Miles was my favorite homeless guy, sophisticated, smart, surrounded by newspapers in a cart, we’d talk about the state of the world, its layers of injustices, there was affection in his language towards me like a caring grandfather, attention to our reciprocal exchange. Seeing clearly through crap with someone feels like a hot-wire to the network of You.

We met on a board with other faith leaders supporting spiritual life on Swarthmore Campus. After being invited by a Quaker friend, knowing next to nothing about the board, I left that first meeting River quiet in my belly, crying with joy from our juicy conversations. How real and progressive and loving and spacious. We were able to just talk without a time keeper or overly strict agenda. We were able to bat critical observations around like how secular academia is while students starve for deep meaning in a chaotic world that they know the soundbites of without perhaps the intimacy of a place or people. That dissonance feels dangerous on neural connections forming. Where’s the container?

Ding another war. Ding another forest knocked down. Ding more babies starving. Ding all the plastic that ever was is still here. Ding another hundred acres to build an Ai data center to keep dinging you.

But in our circle with cookies in the middle and a carpet sample that the hosting pastor wanted our feedback on, my brain was allowed to frolic in a field of sunflower opportunities. No dings. Only invisible connections made visible through intentional words and authentic gestures. I could see us mapping out potential for young people to feel rooted, needed, and not in the default to “future generations will fix the world” way, no, this map visually playing out in my head was an intergenerational interdisciplinary network between university, faith space, and community.

Being able to use the word “spirit” in a syllabus when the course is on ecology. Religion classes not simply being historically theoretical. But practical. Churches with older congregations and a name that has been used to abuse feeling safe and relevant for young adults.

For a long time “Christianity” was a bad word for me, “Jesus” a little icky.

But everyone in that room cared. I could see it in their face, no one checking out or checking off. No one preaching in the way that says I know something you don’t. Our dialogue was democratic.

I came home, hugged Gabe and said I think these religious elders are my people. Our doula arrived shortly after to eat our snacks in a beanie and walk through birthing positions, none of which we ended up using. I appreciated how comfortable our Where’s Waldo doula was in her profession, in a strangers home, positioning us like clothed porn stars in the bathroom. She’s in the work that is right for her, I thought.

Envious, I didn’t hold back at upcoming meetings. Younger in age, young in experience as an ordained Interfaith Minister, only a year in as a Quaker, brand spanking new to the group, I was so floored that I had valid stuff to say and my thoughts were held with respect and regard.

I hate that sustainability is often translated as a checking off of boxes. Green this, biodegradable that. It’s not that that isn’t important and people love lists since it helps our brain to take something existential and categorize. But that’s just it, this is existential. So we can only zoom in to manageable meaningful “action items” if we can also zoom out. Otherwise the action items become paying off carbon credits to cover up continual pollution and self driving electric cars spinning in circles in a culdesac, short circuits to reduction without addressing the mindset and economy that houses the whole damn mess. This isn’t just a two dimensional relationship, this is 4D. Up, down, in, out. This, my friends, is spiritual.

And by this I don’t mean climate change, though that is a product. By this I mean a way of being in the world.

My container, the house I want to reimagine in, I have come to accept, is one of faith.

Buckminster Fuller wrote the “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” in 1969. I should probably read the book. But he inspired my teachers, a synopsis PDF document lives in my cabinet and lately I’ve been thinking about instructions for Life-ing. You’ll come to know I never follow instructions properly, not with cooking or setting up a gadget. Maybe you’ll be better.

You’re only fourteen weeks old but one day you’ll hear the graduation song, class of 99’, reminding us all to wear sunscreen. So I won’t belabor the need for protection on an increasingly warm planet with less shade. Which in of itself is a double edged thing. Because no to skin cancer is a yes to chemicals in the water disrupting the hormones of aquatic life. Thus we’ve started the conversation of brackish grays. Not one off cliches that are black and white, salt or fresh. So let that be the first lesson. You are always in relationship.

There will never be a moment where you exist in isolation only thinking about your selfish cells. Still, don’t go crazy and pause the whole day for stepping on a fly. But know where your food comes from. Where your waste goes. This is taking responsibility for reciprocity.

Relationships are lifelong works of art. Each one depends on your state of mind. If the attitude is all woe is me disbelief or utter apathy then that my friend is what you’ll receive. It can take decades to not play victim to your own story. Try to reduce wasted time for everyone’s sake and your own sanity. Birds are great companions for feeling the feelings in stillness, once named, move through. There are other branches.

I know you’re capable of holding more than one truth at a time. So if you want to Life, as a verb, in the experiment of Life, as a noun, get used to reconciling the differences while protecting the commons. Like when Papa and I disagree but keep each other and you safely rooted in soil love. Diversity isn’t just different colors, shapes or sizes, it’s different ways of thinking or solving a problem adaptive to the environmental conditions. Since diversity makes life possible, the journey is exploring how to be in right relationship with all that difference. Also sometimes people, including you and me, just say stupid things. Don’t take it all so seriously. A little bit of grace unless of course you feel unsafe. In which case, say it, boundary it, if needed, leave it.

In this journey, it will help to make decisions with regard to limits. All healthy systems have limits, like your body if it goes above 106 degrees or the planet if it goes above 2, but not all systems are healthy, like exponential capital growth or eating endless cheese puffs. And like my mom told me, everything in moderation. You will witness so many unhealthy systems that it will break your heart again and again. You will still have heart left.

After broken, comes open, if we let others in. Infinity in form has no place on a finite planet, but it does for the mind. Plus the whole energy-is-neither-created-nor-destroyed-only-transformed thing, so though there is no forever, we too, if rightfully placed, will turn to compost regenerating new life. The form will change but what you do, the choices you make, the contents matter because those contents are ingredients for future containers.

Today you tummy timed on the grass for the first time and we looked for four leaf clovers.

“The Sunscreen Song” are words from an essay called “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written by Mary Schmich for the Chicago Tribune in 1997. Misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut and turned into a hit recording by Baz Luhrmann, I had no idea until now that this song, the song I randomly YouTube to feel or cry, was a poetic essay written by a female journalist. Sure, she gets royalties, but River let’s be clear about one thing, say her name.

Photo credit: Gabe Cariola (Papa)

a procedure table surrounded by teal colored scrubs and masks.

Some amount of fentanyl inserted into my lower back

leaves me numb from pain but not pressure nor sensation,

I know when the cut happens.

A major surgery,

the opposite of delivering a baby on a bed of moss.

The unexpected.

While reading Michael Pollen’s, The Botany of Desire,

River snoozing in a wrap on my chest,

questions begin to percolate around what we perceive as natural.

The way our son came into this world

is like the story of the American Apple,

some process of coevolution dependent on human intervention.

Despite the marketing,

the apple isn’t native nor wild,

but a migratory product of grafting.

So too a kind of surgery.

Both require the precision of a knife.

Photo: The first class I ever taught as an undergrad, a project based course called the Energy Reduction Challenge that ran as an Independent Study.

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I sit on zoom having one-on-one sessions with my students providing direct feedback about their final project. Some end with - you were a great professor or I really learned a lot or I enjoyed the field trips, especially to the community garden. Some don’t show up. None of them know this is my last semester. The last sustainable systems course at Parsons School of Design or the last time I will be part time faculty at The New School. They’ve watched my belly expand over the months. Some have congratulated me. But this is no temporary maternity leave. This is a clear ending of a chapter.

For fourteen years (spread over the course of eighteen), I have been a student or faculty and often both at The New School. It’s where I jumped on cafeteria tables in hazmat suits theatrically putting biodegradable plates and food out of the trash can into the brown compost bins. It’s where I projectile vomited on the way to the classroom door in front of my students as their metal stools screech back, adrenaline spinning after raising my voice through the loudspeaker in the Lang Courtyard at the beginning of the 2022 Part Time Faculty Strike. It’s where I graduated from four different programs, questioning throughout each one, what is it I am to do in the world. One message is clear: devote myself to Earth, but how. It’s where I make out in the electrical room of the dorm downloading data from the suites using eGauge meters I purchase with a green fund grant I receive. New School is the base from which I create a Net-Zero Community Incubator in collaboration with a church, scientists and residents, facilitating 45 students research and projects to directly benefit the environment and community of Greenpoint. I name it CELLA, Latin for the small inner chamber inside a Zirruguat, a temple made out of a hill. It’s where I first feel a kind of power to my potential.

One year, a product design student from Columbia transfers to my sustainable systems section, saying something about my passion. For his final project, he designs and makes a bench for the corner cafe using all refurbished materials including wood from a door on the sidewalk outside a renovating brownstone I carry to the architecture building. I kiss boys on that bench. I recoup on that bench after going to the Lenox Hill hospital upon return from a trip abroad. I talk to strangers who become characters in a screenplay I write while enrolled in continuing education, at The New School. My student made that bench in a class I designed. Compensation was irrelevant for so long. The class gave me purpose. It served just like New School, until it didn’t.

It’s become about spotting Ai use; final projects fall flat, too packaged, too gimmicky, too marketable. I miss messy art in someone trying to figure it out, asking big questions of themselves and their place in the world. Conversations that are organically live with brains forming, no headphones in their ears under their hoods. Every device, every tech oligarch bidding, then betting for their attention. I too am evolving.

New School probably wouldn’t have happened in my life if I didn’t take a medical leave from Pratt Institute when I was 19 years old. I would have stuck it out in a program and on a campus where I was unhappy. But on December 18, 2007, a cluster of tangled up veins missing their capillaries too thin to sustain blood flow, ruptured in my left cerebellum. I’m bringing a life into this world, our baby, at the time of celebrating the eighteenth anniversary of the “brain bleed” that could have taken mine. The timing: the human soon to arrive, the closing of something I’ve outgrown, though with much uncertainty ahead, comes a concrete embodied clarity. What’s sustainable in one context may not be in another.

I sit in an environmental book club at a local bookstore discussing “Human Nature” by Kate Marvel. There is an elder to the left of me, legs crossed, glasses on, so sure of the solutions, the actionable items, the daughter with two degrees in environmental science and environmental studies from Oberlin and Indiana respectively, familiar platitudes rolling off the tongue, “We all must do our part.” Followed by her list of good deeds, planting trees, installing solar.

There’s nothing wrong with anything she says. I‘ve just heard it so many times and I’m bored. There was no space for getting into the juice of the text without the knee jerk guilt ridden action item. She turns to the college student beside her, “You’re the hope of the future.” Another cheesy platitude. I resist laughing out loud and scoffing, please come on. Instead, I readjust in my chair, touch my baby belly, let’s get to the good stuff guys.

This book reminded me that a woman was the first to discover carbon dioxide warming the atmosphere. Eunice Foote, American chemist and inventor, published a paper in 1856 titled “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays”. Foote died in 1888 and for 160 years her contributions were unknown and uncredited, before being rediscovered by women academics in the twentieth century. I want to talk about King James ordering the execution of thousands of women he blamed for bad weather using their witchcraft. But really the cold dreary days of Britain and Scotland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were likely due to a series of serious volcanic eruptions prior; scientists know a cooling effect from the ash in the clouds is a consequence. And I don’t need to comment on today’s political rhetoric for the pattern to remain obvious. I’m no historian nor climate scientist but the message is clear. Patriarchy and climate denial have always gone hand in hand.

We don’t know the sex of the baby and it’s been fascinating watching people toss their obsessions and opinions about gender around so anxious to know if it’s a boy or a girl. Or perhaps we’re just used to asking from a place of curiosity.

Whoever they are and will be, may they feel connected to this one Earth as securely as they are connected to us as parents. May they know they are worthy of being in the presence and in just relationship with Nature. May we look to their eyes for guidance on their own unique evolution not screens.

It’s an odd thing acknowledging the physical reality our species faces as we continue down a trajectory towards a sixth extinction, while about to bring in new life upon this new year. When I was a kid, one of the earliest memories I have (besides masturbating in the sun) was thinking the question, why are we here, why am I here and feeling a rush of emotions unexplainable. The longer I’m here, the more I don’t know the answer to that question or what it even means against a cosmological backdrop. The closest I’ve gotten is that perhaps we’re a spiritual evolution of a physical law, that love is gravity providing us the opportunity for conscious right relationship.

Baby glides their foot across the womb and I see/feel from the outside, the protruding roll of a small bump, this native alien, this ancient act of embodying the next generation, for all the questions that continue to be asked, I place the palm of my hand on top of their little Foot.

(Photo: kids playing, Alison Lee Photography LLC)

I can’t stop thinking about what would have happened if we walked away. Would he have to face the insane reality to stay detained for who knows how long, had we just left. Would ICE hunt him down regardless. I can’t get over the white Polo sweatshirt wrapped around his shoulders as we watch him take the elevator up to the third floor alone. To impress the judge he never saw. The attire said it all. Buttoned down short sleeve light blue Polo, denim jeans, white clean shoes, and that damn white sweater tied around his shoulders. As if a tennis match was in order.

As if the illusion of white American prestige would surpass the gangsterly dressed immigration officers in masks and sweats, guns locked to waist, loaded, waiting to handcuff, to follow orders for a starting salary 4x that of minimum wage in Pennsylvania plus the signing bonus of $50,000 and the promise to make six figures as quickly as Trump’s detention goals are met. As if any of the paperwork neatly aligned in the manila folder that he carried to mandated check-ins mattered; as if any of the legal steps our friend took to continue seeking asylum were answered appropriately with due process to stay in the county that glorifies freedom, that legalized sanctity for anyone needing refuge since the Holocaust.

I ask my students how they’re feeling about what’s happening in the news, I leave it without context, a simple temperature check. One student speaks up, “terrified but I keep it in the back of my mind. My parents were born in Laos.” While this student shares another from China covers her face with sweaty palms, I imagine because it’s all too much. What words will do justice.

The stole draped around my neck, signifying clergy with the words SPIRIT and UBUNTU, framing my pregnant belly doesn’t matter. We can not accompany our friend, we can not enter beyond the initial security point. Managed by the police who make sure to tell us they’re not ICE. They tell us when they see our friend on the security camera waiting in the same spot he’s been for an hour, as we wait in the vestibule and outside for him to be released. Two minutes later the security guard goes to the male bilingual accompanier standing just beyond the doors and says our friend has just been detained. Silently over the security camera they watch all day. “I’m sorry,” the police officer says.

One by one they pick them up, put them in a room with no camera. Then a van. Then the federal prison across the street. Then a van. Then a detention center. Perhaps the one with high rates of solitary confinement and abuse. Like the one our friend was sent to. And for what? Working minimum wage so you wouldn’t have to? For leaving one country, where it wasn’t safe, to the promised opportunity of another. To the nation of red, white and blue - not the stars and stripes of a fallacy, a dream unfulfilled, but the colors of blood, supremacy, and a chokehold fear.

I ask my students what justice has to do with sustainability. I give a mini lecture on indigenous sovereignty and the human evolutionary desire to both migrate and settle. I want my students to stop doing their final projects on recycling. Because I’m bored of the first “green” go-to and the complexity of today requires us to see through a 3D systems thinking lens. The answer: there is no opposing difference between actualized justice and that which better sustains all life forms. Power houses will try to pin say an ethical vegan against a racial justice activist. And yet I think we know better by now than to bite the bait of perceived division as the oligarchs thrust their wand over any sense of safety transforming society (but not humanity) into a kind of robotic militarized apocalyptic armageddon.

We start a signal chat, the accompaniers of various faiths. One communicates with the boy’s mother. The other asks our meeting house for funding to support the high cost of communication so the mother can talk with her son regularly. It’s already been $700 for less than 20 days. Humanity steps in. Shows up. It’s not enough. We’re just paying ICE, the money making machine that charges a human turned inmate $11 for a toothbrush.

Days later I still can’t drop the image of the white Polo sweater criss cross around the boy’s shoulders. The sweater he couldn’t take once detained and held in freezing conditions. The one in the plastic bag with his iPhone, the manila folder, cash and the rest of his belongings that we had to hand over to his crying mother squeezing her four year old daughter’s hand on the sidewalk. She and I use Google translate to communicate. She asks me how far along I am. She shows me photos of her middle daughter in school.

When the police officer denied our entry to accompany I swear he said almost flippantly it’s up to you. Looking at the boy who speaks a different language. As if the officer knew what was inevitably going to happen. Should we have just left, reconvened as a group, would we have saved him two more days, weeks, months, years? Would they have detained him more aggressively at McDonalds, showed up at his home in front of his little sisters?

This story is stuck, just like our friend trapped with no possibility of another outcome and I don’t know how to end it, not here nor there.

I ask the nineteen year olds from all over the world what they think of one of the largest visible investments the city has taken towards climate resilience, a direct response from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “I don’t get it, this is supposed to protect the city from flooding?” A student with a confused look asks.

An initial $1.45 billion dollars and then some $1.7 billion more, “The Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Street Coastal Resilience project is a key part of a multibillion-dollar program that includes elevated roadways, shoreline extensions, new green spaces, floodwalls and flood gates—all to prevent sea level rise and heavy rainfall from overwhelming and destroying critical buildings, roads and utilities in the city.” (ENR East)

(Photo: Looking out onto the East Estuary - it’s an estuary not a river - from the Brooklyn side.)

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“Do you think it’s sufficient at protecting the city from heavy flooding, high hurricane waves and added sea level rise?”

The teenagers don’t look convinced. One student lights a cigarette.

Just then a wave during high tide slaps against the first line of defense, the concrete contour of Manhattan that’s raised just a few feet above the East Estuary; a renovated walkway where pedestrians can lean over the black metal bars to see the murky body of water that once housed more oysters than e.coli, and joggers run along inhaling car exhaust from the raised FDR highway about twenty five yards inland.

“We’re standing on landfill, what used to surround this island, Brooklyn and Queens along the estuary, before industry and settlers, were wetlands. Which do you think is more resilient - a wetland or a concrete wall?”

This isn’t particularly a hard question most intuitively know the answer - a wetland.

To liven things up, I try to tell them a story. “When I was just a few years older than you, I was a resident advisor at the best New School dorm we no longer have on 20th St and 8th Ave, never again will I live for free in Chelsea.” A few perk up and kind of smile. It was October 2012 and Superstorm Sandy ravaged New York. A tropical cyclone from the Caribbean made its way to the Mid-Atlantic and devastated thousands of lives, homes and infrastructure. You all were what, six years old?”

One girl says, “I kind of remember, I was in Connecticut, the wind was intense.”

I nod in acknowledgement.

“The waves, heavy rainfall and wind were so intense that an explosion happened at the ConEdison plant right behind us.” I point to the four large exhaust columns stemming from the factory. “And as a result, all of lower Manhattan below 23rd St, was in a blackout for ten days.”

They stare unamused. So I get back into the story and bring out the romance.

“As a Resident Advisor, I was handing around glow-sticks to residents and everyone was running around the halls and stairwell in the pitch dark. When I was released from my duties as an RA as all The New School buildings closed, I rollerbladed while my boyfriend at the time biked through the blacked out black night. In the Lower East Side we saw a small hole in the wall restaurant open with candles and a single operating generator. A limited menu and we savored our bruschetta over a small candle as if it was the best thing in the world.”

One guy smiles, the poet of the class, and says, “That sounds cool.”

“It was. And it was a bit like a movie, something I’ll always remember. The Williamsburg bridge was half dark on the Manhattan side and the other half lit up from the Brooklyn electrical grid. We stayed at my boyfriend’s apartment in Bushwick, making chili for residents in the Rockaways who were seriously impacted.”

The sense of nostalgia and awe I feel even while sharing the story fifteen years later doesn’t seem to translate to my audience. A life changing adrenaline event, that both signified my first lived experience of an exaggerated natural disaster from climate change and happened to parallel a time I was falling in love — to them it was nothing — I could have been doing jumping jacks pregnant naked on the sidewalk and the girl would still puff a cigarette and the majority would keep checking their phone.

Days later, I try to unravel my emotion around this dissonance. There’s a kind of sadness. Of course they won’t know what hurricane Sandy was like, they didn’t live it. They grew up in Singapore, China, Korea, California, Canada, Slovakia, Seattle. They’re inundated with “ bad news” and just want to be nineteen in NYC.

There’s a kind of sadness to this inability to pass on lived experiences. They will have to live through their own unfortunate natural disasters in order to potentially embody the direct connection of climate change, that could take years, years we don’t have.

My old neuroscience professor from The New School, Marcel Kinsbourne, would say something along the lines of our biggest flaw as humans is we forget. There is no literal stored collective memory that’s embodied from one generation to the next and tied to emotion the same way as a lived experience is. Stories, artwork, literature, all of those require a choice to engage, a readiness to receive, an openness to be moved.

Our “progress” in the development of physical tools evolves rapidly. Our social tools however have largely remained the same, we haven’t evolved out of killing each other pointlessly or systemizing genocides. We’re the only species that destroys their own home. We’re essentially rudimentary cavemen with excessive tools doing the dirty work. How are we supposed to build off of previous generations’ investments and insights socially and emotionally if we’re too bored to even engage with an older generation’s story?

Perhaps this sounds bitter or blunt or the opposite of optimistic.

And of course there are people gathering stories and insights from elders all across the globe. All of them however are making a choice. What happens if we don’t choose?

I Googled ol’ Marcel Kinsbourne whom I took every class of his possible and worked in his neuroscience lab while completing my BA and MA in psychology at The New School. He passed away in April 2024 at ninety-three. He escaped the Nazi regime in Vienna at eight years old with his parents four days before the border closed. He is from the last generation to have lived that experience in his body. I wonder what he would say about today’s American fascism paralleling sea level rise.

Part of the drive to write, photograph, gather ever since I was a child is this unyielding desire to document both as a means of making meaning in the present and a way to connect what will become past to the upcoming present.

I don’t want to forget, be better in the next.

Self Portrait, 2012

Cafe afternoon writing grounds me to place. A place where relationships deepen every time I show up.

The fall semester is underway. Four weeks in and I’ve already received the first series of emails with, “under the weather, won’t make it to class”. And I wonder which part is under the weather. When did we think that constant exposure to every injustice everywhere is a good idea? Or maybe we didn’t think. Maybe there was no we. The systems and powers and technology kept - keep amping up, no regard for limits, boundaries, or space. Algorithms are always hungry for more reactions. How many of my nineteen year olds are on an Instagram roller coaster of cats talking and drones dropping bombs. How many of them are jaded, exhausted, dopamine drained before the day even begins.

In class, I illustrate feedback loops with a purple dry erase marker on the whiteboard. A student’s eyes in the audience visibly droop. We map out evidence for intelligence in plants after listening to Zoë Schlanger, an eloquent science writer, in conversation with Chris Morgan on the podcast The Wild for homework. On the Amtrak I realize for maybe the eighteenth time, my energy is invested in what sustains, not what drains. The intelligence of plants is one entryway.

Without a brain or central nervous system, plants make decisions, choose which direction to grow, when to reproduce, roots move towards the vibrational acoustics of water running, register pain and communicate to other plants. While walking from Moyihan Hall to the Highline in Manhattan, arguably the nicest path from midtown to thirteenth street from plants arching over concrete paths, I call Gabe and say, “I’ve had a stroke of insight.” He responds with, “uh oh, okay give me a second to put my earpods in….okay, tell me.”

“What if feedback is cellular?”

-

An elder friend calls to talk about an upcoming local climate event we’re organizing. After hello a slew of personal and political bullet points come tumbling down the word hill, including Charlie Kirk, all of which are spiraling in his head like a bad game of dodgeball. I walk my dog in the Quaker cemetery next door while listening over the phone, acorn shells crunching under my feet. This isn’t a pragmatic conversation I gather, this is a call with someone’s dysregulated nervous system. Which begs the question, what’s it all worth? If we want to make positive change in an unjust world, do we need a regulated central nervous system?

-

At the cafe, I watch as a man enters, doesn’t order and sits across from someone strumming the cafe community guitar. I notice the multiple hospital wrist bands, the familiar tinge of grime on hands and face from days of not showering, as he talks to no one listening. The guy with headphones on points to his phone turns it around and shows a video he’s watching, busy, don’t talk to me, the gesture expresses. So he stands up and tries talking to someone else in line waiting to order. She notices the babble, the grime, gauges the “crazy” and she to ignores him.

People have no problem ignoring the stumbling drunk with hospital wrist bands; read the signs, turn away, don’t engage, eventually the crazy guy will go away, so I can peacefully go back to casually swiping starvation, murder, and cheap clothing ads. How is it that we can so easily ignore what visibly appears “crazy” even when harmless and not disengage from the making of crazy even when harmful.

The making of crazy is the 24/7/365 access from multiple channels, multiple mediums to non-stop injustices. It’s giving a narcissist attention. It’s getting caught in a negative reinforcing feedback loop. When channels of incoming “news” take precedence over in person relationships, acts of service, and engagement in different local communities, then who doesn’t feel crazy. If a person demonstrates agency in a web of accountable others, in real life in real time in settings within reach, they participate in a positive reinforcing feedback loop. Ground to build from.

A published study in 2022 entitled “Activism in the Digital Age: The Link Between Social Media Engagement with Black Lives Matter-Relevant Content and Mental Health,” found, “Correlations revealed that greater engagement with BLM-related social media posts was related to more severe mental health symptoms.” And if that wasn’t enough, “Race significantly moderated the relationship between engagement and anxiety and trauma-related symptoms, such that these relationships were stronger for participants who identified as racial minorities.”

The greater engagement with videos of police brutality, for example, was correlated with greater psychological distress. Perhaps it upset you enough to go in the streets to protest. Most every day for a few weeks I marched and all throughout the day the Slack back and forth of various methods of organizing, arguing with the likeminded over apps, was more frustrating than walking for hours until curfew at 11pm, getting broken up by the police and tossed around. And what happens beyond the adrenaline of urgency; I’m most curious about what sustains acts of service, what promotes an open heart, over time?

There is no evidence to suggest that the more time someone watches TV, scrolls on social media, the more aware they are of how a systemic issue actually operates. There is no evidence to suggest watching news or engaging regularly with social media is positively correlated with direct community engagement or direct activism sustained over time. Content is tangential, supplemental at best, to direct relationships.

What if intentionally ignoring is different than ignorance?

Another study published in Social Issues and Policy Review in 2022 critically explores if social media undermines social cohesion. “Social cohesion and user engagement are sometimes at odds—outrage and misinformation may increase the amount of time users spend on a platform but negatively impact social cohesion.” Think about all the back and forth rhetoric wars on top of the actual wars.

Even approaching this topic is a hot-totty no one wants to touch and it comes with loaded assumptions. In fact the messaging especially for us democrats around engaging regularly with news is you must stay glued, engaged with the most important things of our time. If you aren’t, you are silent, which is to be the oppressor; you might as well be the one dropping the bomb. The “right” thing is to watch the news, talk about it whenever you can, to argue about it with relatives, to post about it, obsess over it, “if you aren’t enraged, you’re not paying attention.” Sound familiar?

And it seems the only other option on the table is it’s extreme opposite, what my mom will say in defense of spiraling about something else the man in the white house did, “Well I’m not keeping my head in the sand.”

What if learning about systemic complex wicked problems and the personalities nested within them was not supported by passive doom-scrolling. As I write this I see National Geographic just published an article on how doom-scrooling “rewires your brain”. Gabe nods, “makes sense” but how many times are we trapped in the loop?

Plenty of people have written about democrats losing sight of a vision, where they want to go, that we are in defense reaction mode; with a collective dysregulated nervous system it’s almost impossible to create another way.

What if feedback is cellular, not the cellphone in your hand, the biological cells in your hand, or in a leaf, cells that require a relationship with what’s around you to co-exist. Let’s start there.

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From four years of full-time heavily grant funded programming dedicated to transforming a public elementary school into a National Wildlife Federation Green Flag Eco-School, it looks like the only thing that survived, at least that’s worthy of being advertised on the school’s website, is the hydroponics program and one causal photo of kids with the remaining existence of the large schoolyard garden in the background. (Unsure if the schoolyard garden is being integrated into curriculum or used as an outdoor classroom, the primary function of creating it).

What about the zero waste program with organics collection, school-wide education for sustainability curriculum, Eco-School’s faculty resource library, making stations, sensory beds, place and nature based STEAM afterschool curriculum, or student run farm stand from the hydroponics production? And the website definitely doesn’t include the fight to reduce toxic cleaning supplies or the battle in remediating faucets and water fountains with lead in the fixtures. Or perhaps the most rewarding part of my presence in that school, watching a dedicated teacher transform from instructing students to passively fill in outdated workbooks while actively squirming in their chairs to asking students engaging open-ended questions, leading with inquiry allowing pedagogy to unfold into playful experiments.

The more I read on the turquoise velvet couch and reflect, the more it becomes clear how vulnerable the entire education system is to capitalism. The “enrichment program” of the time is almost entirely based on what and where the funding is coming from.

A direct quote from the website of the school where I use to work:

“Our PTA-funded Art program offers the students the chance to explore various mediums and styles. Our art teacher works with grades K-5 to unlock all student's creative abilities.”

Without dedicated parents writing grants and donating their own funding, there would be no art in this “blue ribbon” school.

Or a neighboring school where a colleague worked:

“Thanks to our active PTA, generous donations, and grants, we are proud to keep the arts and other student enrichment alive at P.S…”

It’s common at public schools for the PTA, a volunteer group of dedicated parents, to be responsible for acquiring the funding for what’s considered enrichment. This looks like active parents, primarily mothers, who in addition to raising children and often working part-to-full-time jobs, have to apply for grants, write proposals, manage budgets, and fight for the survival of what should be a necessity at a school: art, theatre, music, ect. And because there is so much pressure for the enrichment class to appear successful and sexy, the curriculum is often over prescribed with an emphasis on end product not process; how good can this painting be to impress parents, leadership and grant funders? Forget about play.

In line with the science of evolutionary psychologists, as a teacher Erika Christakis knows that, “Play is the fundamental building block of human cognition, emotional health, and social behavior. Play improves memory and helps children learn to do mathematical problems in their heads, take turns, regulate their impulses, and speak with greater complexity. All mammals play, and the higher-order mammals, such as a dolphins, chimps, bears, and elephants, play more than other mammals.” And all play is not equal.

For years the obsession within early education reflects our larger societal obsession with technology and the billionaires driving that industry. STEM, STEAM, robotics, coding at five years old. Instead of nature, imagination driven play, inquiry, and place based learning, all of which significantly improve academic performance, reduce absenteeism, improve teacher quality - the enrichment program funded at another public elementary school where I taught is a “Virtual Reality Drone Soccer” program in partnership with Vivid Imaginations.

The program’s description: “Combining the thrill of drone flight with the power of virtual reality, students enter a futuristic world where they code, pilot, and compete in drone soccer games. This hands-on program builds tech skills and teamwork in an unforgettable way.”

What does “virtual reality drone soccer” have to do with elementary school age kids engaging in creative free play with their immediate environment, or how to be whole growing human beings with each other, or how to expand their inherent curiosities with the natural world by developmentally appropriate content and contexts? How do they learn the concept and practice of truly hands-on experimentation and teamwork with an individual remote in their hand for a prescribed program where students fill in the blanks, call it code, and remote control a drone?

Vivid Imaginations, the one providing this “virtual reality drone soccer” game is a British based toy manufacturer with a net income of over $33 million. Nothing on the company’s website is clear about how these “toys” are in any way designed to facilitate developmentally appropriate learning so why are they being implemented into schools as a replacement for actual hands-on experiential learning?

After a quick Google search, apparently “240 U.S. K -12 grade schools now host drone soccer teams.” The article I explored in Ed Tech Magazine claims it “prepares students for a career path in aviation.” Which is apparently what's necessary in fifth grade if we want future pilots of drones, a primary use in the military. This kind of technological gadgetry replacing imaginative play that is regenerative - to me - shows more about adult industrial desires than developmentally appropriate curriculum. Every event and program should be able to answer, who is this designed for? If it’s not truly beneficial for children’s developmentally appropriate learning then it should be reconsidered.

Part of this equation seems to be a fixation on using adult language, adult careers even, in early education. This satisfies our adult anxieties about our children competing in a competitive capitalistic economy, a four year old doesn’t care how they make money at forty. I protested career day when I was a sustainability coach. Instead I read Dr. Seuss, Oh the Places You’ll Go, to preschoolers and we talked and laughed about the silly characters in the book and the infinite places we can all go figuratively and literally.

The hardest part about integrating education for sustainability into an existing school with existing leadership, culture and curriculum, is that no one knows what sustainability means. Everyone is tired, wants it to be easy, wants a packaged curriculum, a fancy technology to solve the issue, they want to emphasize recycling but not go outside. Recycling is often paired with guilt and anxiety to be responsible citizens, “it’s up to you guys to save the planet,” is something I hear adults project onto children even as young as second grade. Why are we dumping adult responsibilities onto precious children’s imaginations about what’s possible, often intervening in a child’s inherent ability to form a secure attachment with Nature inevitably fostering a sense of ethical stewardship? Why design an entire unit on recycling showing pictures of turtles caught in plastic and not allocate forty minutes to look at what lives in soil?

Erika Christakis, certified pre-school director, teacher, faculty member of Yale Child Study Center, and author of The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups, says it best “Four-and-five-year-olds make good little recyclers because they are such concrete thinkers and enjoy performing jobs. So it might seem like a good idea to teach young children to protect the environment from a very early age. But Yale developmental psychologist Chin Reyes worries that the current science education paradigm in early childhood settings is skewed to a narrow focus on stewardship and sustainability - a focus on what children do to the environment, with less attention paid to what the environment can do to children. She and a growing number of scientists believe that we would have better luck fostering environmental stewardship, among other important science objectives, if we flipped the template and concentrated first on allowing children to experience up close the myriad benefits of nature absent any ulterior motives.”

I hate to think the schools I worked in had to somehow compensate for adult anxiety around climate change, took on a grant funded project and we were just the trend for that period of time before the next one came along. From community murals to virtual drone soccer. From curriculum aligned with principles education for sustainability to Common Core’s latest lesson in a box. Without understanding the developmental psychology of a child, the irreplaceable importance of play and a child’s inherent relationship with the natural world, there is no sustaining education for sustainability in education.

Just before this, about a hundred yards up the hill as I make my way to them, I projectile vomit citrus water after picking up not just my dog’s poop but another dog’s poop nearby whose owner neglected to do the duty that makes all dog owners look bad. I’m seventeen weeks pregnant.

“You have a degree in that right?”

I work in education for sustainability. This provides zero clarity for 99.99% of people.

“So that’s what we’ve been talking about, environmental stuff,”

Cool. I nod.

“What do you think about what’s happening with the atmosphere?”

Well climate change is real. If they are asking then that typically means one thing.

The other skinnier guy, also in his sixties, says “I just think it’s the weather.”

Think of climate as weather patterns over time. To myself I say, whup here we go.

The first guy asks the other, “So you’re a republican?”

The skinnier guy who thinks climate change is just weather answers, “I’m a libertarian.”

There isn’t really an opening and before long wind turbines are being ridiculed. Here’s what I don’t have the energy post vomit to say:

You know what I’m not? A neurosurgeon. But one saved my life and good thing because he studied and practiced for a long time exactly what to do when someone like me has a subarachnoid hemorrhage as a result of multiple aneurysms rupturing inside an atrial venous malformation located in my left cerebellum. You don’t need to know what that is, because he does.

You know what else I’m not? A climate scientist. Are you? I know enough to know what I don’t fully know or have the ability to explain to you. I trust the overwhelming patterns in science, some of which are increasingly observable to everyday people, the scientists who have been studying the impact of human induced greenhouse gas emissions on ice sheets, in the ocean, in the atmosphere since the late 1800s. And I trust my own lived experience as it relates to climate change.

I continue walking my husky solo in the woods as they head back to their car. While stepping intentionally over tree roots making my way down the slope before the incline, feet now accustomed to uneven Earth after eighteen years of flat concrete generating hip pain, I contemplate the significance in a society’s ability to trust.

One could argue the science till their blue in the face but humans don’t make most decisions for rational reasons, we often make them based on emotional reactions. Especially when it’s something that translates as existential as climate change. My degrees are not in environmental science, they are in psychology.

Husky cools off in the creek, pronounced in some parts of Pennsylvania as “crik”, the nuances in pronunciation. I know and understand what they’re saying, even though it sounds like an entirely different word. This is taken in consideration with context to place. Which makes me think we do this thing called flexibility in extending comprehension even when something sounds “foreign” or “new”. Is that also not an ingredient for the practice of trust?

We know about billions the oil industry has invested in propaganda and think tanks to embed climate denial in people’s daily feeds/channels. Watching TV or holding an iPhone on your couch listening to a guy spit casual language blaming someone or something (like wind turbines or the climate change hoax) for the frustration you feel as an underpaid, undervalued citizen of this country, is much more tantalizing than lobbying the deceiving billion dollar entities that are actually robbing from every species including ours.

While driving through back roads to get to the perfectly ripened wild raspberries (called wineberries) for foraging, I ask my man:

When did people lose trust, societal level trust?

“When everything became a scam.”

But the biggest scam of all is that climate change isn’t real. A paid for campaign to let the richest get richer.

“Write about it.”

It’s been/being written about. But I will add my theory. In order to truly trust I think it requires an open broken heart. Most of us have been betrayed already on a large scale. In debt from universities and underemployed. Unable to receive affordable healthcare so we don't have the physical therapy our chronic condition requires. Too broke to buy a house, two decades later in age than when our parents first bought theirs. Unable to regenerate land burned from excessive pesticide use, unable to resist the developers from knocking at the door, offering money you’ve never known.

Sometimes I just look my students in the eye after they express utter overwhelm in how to change such an integrated powerful system and first I offer a genuine apology.

I’m so sorry that you’ve been betrayed. I am with you. Thank you for being in this with me.

We come up with our own definition using accurate language that places the responsibility where it belongs:

Climate change is not an environmental issue, it’s an environmental consequence of an economic system.

Healing begins with naming.

(micro-burst aftermath, Media, PA April 2025)

Often after a natural event everyone meets in the streets and parks to share their storm story and support each other.

One such story from a friend in the dog park includes an annoying client who expresses frustration that they couldn’t get a spray tan while there was no electricity. The client claims, “but I’m a member!” As if membership is exempt from blackouts. We both agreed people are silly, channeling all kinds of anger in the wrong place or to the wrong person. And then my friend says as if talking to the annoying client, “I mean haven’t you ever heard of an act of God?!” To which I respond, “or a storm with high gusts of wind.”

Later in the car, husky with his head out the window, Gabe says, “well that is what insurance companies call it, an act of God.” I’m vaguely familiar with this fact but after a friend used the phrase so casually and confidently, I couldn’t stop thinking about the etiology and impact of the phrase.

After a quick google search, I’m baffled by the titles on the topic including a New York Times article from 2013, “Natural Disasters or ‘Acts of God’?

There are long reddit comments of why god allows natural disasters.

Wikipedia defines act of god as “damnum fatale, (“loss arising from inevitable accident”), an event caused by no direct human action (e.g. severe or extreme weather and other natural disasters) for which individual persons are not responsible and cannot be held legally liable for loss of life, injury, or property damage."

I’d ask my students using the language in this commonly approved definition, where is the responsibility placed? No direct human action. Denying scientifically proven human induced climate change.

In my Sustainable Systems course, freshman file into class on day one knowing most of the basics. When asked “what are the signs of climate change?” One or two students typically raise their hand at first. “Extreme and more frequent natural disasters like the wildfires in my hometown in California right now.” Is a common response which everyone agrees upon. But those brave enough to question ask, “but how do we know it’s not just natural?” And if no one directly asks I prompt, often playing antagonist in my own classroom, “Natural is the adjective used to describe the disaster, so is this just nature doing it’s thing, it’s always occurred and will continue to occur, is there a difference in what’s happening today?”

Typically a student will raise their hand and say something along the lines of, “yeah but there are more and they’re more intense. Like we’ve always had wildfires in California but the season now is longer and more severe because of droughts and higher temperatures. All the fossil fuel burning is making it worse.” (I know they’re f*cking smart students.)

As long as extreme natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy are an “act of God” insurance companies don’t have to cover the tremendous damage (lawyers often have to find loopholes or the right language). Thousands of New Yorkers were rejected, underpaid or remain in litigation over coverage from damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.

If my nineteen year olds understand that no god is controlling the weather up there but humans in fact do influence weather patterns over time through our emission of greenhouse gases, then I’m curious as to how this is such a common phrase outside of insurance companies as a means of reason for natural disasters. Which begs larger questions beyond this brief inadequate article. How does our language reflect conditioning devoid of human responsibility? How are corporations misusing religious language encouraging denial of climate change?

And since I don’t have the answers, I want to say this…

To me evolution is godly, that humans share ancestors with apes, fungi and stardust, that life itself is carbon. It’s scientifically spiritual how we got here questioning how we got here.

And…when an entire small town shows up sitting in their lawn chairs on sidewalks to cheer families, friends and neighbors running or walking in a local 5 mile. When a neighbor we don’t know invites us to stay in their guest bedroom, use their air conditioner, WIFI and freezer to store our de-thawing meat during a multiple day power outage. When you orgasm from playful sex with the safe and stable father of the baby growing in your belly. These are acts of god to me, feasible through nature’s inherent being. Including our own human - nature.

Unabashedly I'd make the comments I was thinking out loud with a playful voice, "come on guys, this doesn't belong here.” Someone near me hears and says, "I know drives me crazy just recycle it." Another spoke up as she saw me carrying the recyclable items in hand to the next room, she leans away from her laptop towards my direction and confidently announces, "You know recycling doesn't exist, like it actually doesn't exist."

This comment does not come as a I surprise and yet I can feel the layers of emotion building that match the complexity of such a topic and the danger in the mindset behind those words. And so I say, "well it does but you're also not wrong. There's much to say about it."

I drop the items in their appropriate bin and return to the table.

“I’d love to talk about it sometime,” she continues “because after doing it my whole life I remember seeing something that explained why it doesn't actually matter or even exist and I was like why am I doing this."

I lean on the chair next to hers and ask, “A few videos went viral, including this Ted Talk where he reveals the corruption behind waste management, that it was created by the plastic industry/oil industry to allow them to continue producing disposable products, and how flawed the recycling system is that most of it ends up in oceans. Yes corruption and flawed, but the message miscommunicated it doesn’t exist at all, when it does. Where do you live?"

“Harlem, NYC.”

“Okay so likely your recycling facility is SIMS in Redhook which takes the majority of metal, glass, and plastic recycling from all the boroughs except the Bronx. You can even visit the facility. But you're right in the sense that it feels like it doesn't matter and no ones doing it. This country on average, according to the VP of Sustainability at Graham Packaging who has been a regular guest in my Sustainable Systems class says America's diversion rate is 28% which is very low. Meaning we only divert 28% from landfills, that’s the amount on average that get’s properly recycled. This is mainly because there is such high cross contamination or a number of players along any part of the system in any location whom are not participating in proper separation. This doesn't mean that recycling in general doesn't matter, it means we have a lot of work to do.”

Someone else across the table listening chimes in.

"You know I worked in a school and had recycling bins in the classroom and I would always separate as would the kids and then one day the cleaner guy says it doesn't matter they all go in the same bin at the end of the day. And to know we were being lied to really pissed me off."

I respond, "totally, I have worked for those schools and heard the same thing."

"So does it matter?”

A genuine question.

(Me educating a group of little ones about recycling.)

Two new friends are waiting for me to go to the beach. We all agree to continue the chat another time.

The three of us leave the house in similar Miami like beach outfits for Edgartown. We take a side street to get away from the traffic on main but it’s a street too soon and instead of getting to the beach we end up at a golf course. Since we left later than planned post my recycling convo and then got lost we had to return for the next workshop postponing the beach for another time.

On the walk I think of the Director of School Facilities in a suit standing next to me in the mustard colored cafeteria of PS 31 ten years prior. We are behind the waste bins as I monitor the Green Team Waste Warriors helping educate their peers on how to separate as they walk the line, milk carton in blue, chip bag in black, food scraps in brown. This is part of the Zero Waste Initiative our program launched in all public schools in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The Six Figure Suit guy leans in to reveal that he doesn’t recycle even though his job is in part to ensure schools in the district recycle. His secret, that he boldly and proudly confesses to the Sustainability Coach (me!) for getting away with not recycling is putting a strip of duck tape on the outside of the black trash bag to let his buddies know in sanitation not to fine him.

This doesn’t mean recycling doesn’t exist. It means he sucks. And a lot of people do sucky things and when they do, they harm a larger system and not just the productive one, in this case the recycling system, they harm the belief system of a society. Though I knew this ten years ago, it’s taken that amount of time to process the anger I didn’t realize came with it. Frustration from characters like Six Figure Suit over twelve years of working in Education for Sustainability that do the opposite of decent and get paid for it.

Back at the house we continue chatting about recycling, the next night we become friends over sea scallops. She inspires me to start a Substack.

You know how to break the breaking in a system? In other words how to repair one, how to say upcycle the recycling system. Be friends with it. I refuse to collude on top of collusion. I could have chosen to judge the woman who said recycling doesn’t mater and in previous years I think I did. I was so charged by activism in my youth it would have sparked a potentially passionate preach or sarcastic rant walking away feeling righteous and better than. I could have given up when Six Figure Suit confessed his scam. But then the broken system stays broken.

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Where it began

Maybe it was collecting trash on the beach growing up, the free pizza as a college student that lured me into a meeting that became the beginning of organizing, living within local means in the foothills of Himalayas or that first training where the founder of Cloud Institute gave me language for how I already viewed the world. In Systems.

What is Education for Sustainability?

In my own words, Education for sustainability (EFS) is a systemic way of learning and teaching that utilizes the principles of ecological systems (i.e. diversity, interdependence) to inform human thinking, shaping sustainable ways of living among the Natural world.

Why do I have things to say about EFS?

I’ve weighed waste in heels, spent hours separating security metal frames for proper recycling from outdated DOE purple and pink MAC computers with a special impossible-to-find key, cried in front of a class of eighteen 19 year olds when reviewing case studies of environmental racism post George Floyd, listen to tech bros at panel discussions moan on about Ai and “climate solutions”, coached tired senior DOE teachers on how to love teaching again, and made fairy homes with kids in gardens.

There’s the academic stuff too = BA and MA in Psychology from The New School with a thesis questioning whether reason or emotion influence pro-environmental behavior. More student debt with a Post-Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Strategies from the New School. I’ve received training in Education for Sustainability from Cloud Institute, Children’s Environmental Literacy Foundation, and Shelburne Farms in Vermont. I’ve taught, coached, and written education for sustainability curriculum for over twelve years.

Substack wants me to tell you what you’ll get out of this

I’m not sure, a post a month I imagine. There will likely be spelling mistakes.

I’d love for people to let me know what their questions and concerns are in the field of sustainability and I can try to answer them with anecdotes and experience on the ground as an educator.

Look below it’s me in the field with a kid who’s face is partially covered allowing me to use this photo without consent. It was also a decade ago.

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