Social Justice & Activism: The Creative Process: Activists, Environmental, Indigenous Groups, Artists & Writers Talk Diversi The Creative Process

“So, New York City will ultimately build a seawall that it estimates will cost somewhere in the order of 120 billion dollars. And, you know, the fact is that many cities in the United States will not be able to afford that, especially smaller ones and especially southern ones.
A part of planning for this needs to include thinking about managed retreat from highly vulnerable areas. The tax base of that community that supports schools undermines the real estate market and the value of property, and it can lead to a spiral of economic decline that can be really dangerous for the people who remain. This can really hollow out a community and that's an enormous challenge to deal with, but one way to deal with it is to try to keep the resources and infrastructure in a community proportional to the population that's utilizing it and to maintain some energy and prosperity and vitality. So, I think a lot of places in the United States need to plan to get smaller, which is really the antithesis of the American philosophy of growth and economic growth.
If you want to keep your community intact, you could move together, or you could move to a place where your neighbors have also moved or something like that. That's the kind of new idea that is being batted around that can help keep communities coherent.”

An estimated one in two people will experience degrading environmental conditions this century and will be faced with the difficult question of whether to leave their homes. Will you be among those who migrate in response to climate change? If so, where will you go?

“So for me, it just kind of removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.”

How can we learn to flourish because of who we are, not in spite of it? What is the sensory experience of the world for people with autism and ADHD? How can music help heal trauma and foster identity?

Mattia Maurée is an interdisciplinary composer whose work centers around themes of perception, body, sensation, trauma, and resilience. Their scores for critically acclaimed films have been played in 13 countries. Their poems have been featured in Boston City Hall as part of the Mayor's Poetry Program, Guerrilla Opera, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Mattia composes and performs on violin, voice, and piano, and has taught music for over 20 years. They have received a Master's of Music in Composition at New England Conservatory and a Bachelor's of Music from St. Olaf College. They also are an AUDHD coach, host the AuDHD Flourishing podcast and help other neurodivergent folks heal and find their creative flow in their course Love Your Brain.

“The American Climate Corps builds on the legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which came out of the New Deal after the Great Depression in the United States when the country was getting very close to there being a toppling of the government because there was such a crisis here after the Depression. There were Dust Bowls. People were migrating all over the country to try to find work. And it was a really dark time in the United States. So part of the New Deal included establishing this Conservation Corps, where–and it was only men at the time–young men could go to work, earn a liveable wage, work on teams, and help to build things in the United States. And some of them planted trees. So some of it was conservation, some of them planted trees. They helped with the railroads. They built all sorts of things with the Army Corps of Engineers. So there has been a call for a while now to build an American Climate Corps, which is building off of this legacy. 
The Biden administration finally announced the American Climate Corps last September during Climate Week. In fact, the announcement came out, and one of the unfortunate things about the Climate Corps is that it builds on this amazing legacy, but it didn't receive much funding because the funding was originally going to be part of the Build Back Better Act, which the Biden administration proposed early on. The climate-related policy that ended up being reformulated and repackaged as the Inflation Reduction Act. the Climate Corps was not funded as part of that. So it's coming out in a much more limited manner, but what it basically is doing is merging a number of preexisting programs that are designed to help train young people to do work around climate change broadly defined across different agencies in the U. S. government to train them so that they have experience working on addressing climate change in a variety of ways, and also have a pathway into doing green jobs. Be they in the federal government, for nonprofits, or elsewhere in the government. And so it's a wonderful opportunity. The hope is that it will expand out to be thousands, if not more than thousands, tens of thousands of jobs.”

How can we make the radical social changes needed to address the climate crisis? What kind of large ecological disaster or mass mobilization in the streets needs to take place before we take meaningful climate action?

Dana R. Fisher is the Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity and Professor in the School of International Service at American University. Fisher’s research focuses on questions related to democracy, civic engagement, activism, and climate politics. Current projects include studying political elites’ responses to climate change, and the ways federal service corps programs in the US are integrating climate into their work. She is a self-described climate-apocalyptic optimist and co-developed the framework of AnthroShift to explain how social actors are reconfigured in the aftermath of widespread perceptions and experiences of risk. Her seventh book is Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.