For The Wild - TEJU ADISA-FARRAR on Remapping Our World ⧸177

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00:00:30.000 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'll be speaking with Teju

00:00:39.260 Adisa Farrar, a Jamaican-American writer, geographer, and poet whose work focuses on

00:00:45.740 urban culture, environmental issues, climate justice, alternative geographies, and sustainable

00:00:52.180 futures. So I'm thinking about a reframing of space and reframing of identity in space and

00:00:59.600 then placemaking, right? How do we remake place to align with the values and the justice that we

00:01:05.820 know is necessary to give us continuity? Because after all, nature does what it must to continue.

00:01:12.760 Yes, there is tensions. Yes, there is killing. Yes, there is eating. Yes, there is sex. But

00:01:17.900 nature will continue. And humans have gone against nature. And that's why our continuity is at stake.

00:01:23.640 having lived in five european countries and done projects in several others for over a decade

00:01:33.060 teju's work has centered on political racial and environmental justice teju uses a transnational

00:01:40.740 diasporic lens that is informed by culturally resonant moments art and activism she is

00:01:47.360 interested in mapping and documenting Black, resilient ecological futures, Teju spends her

00:01:53.200 time on consulting with progressive organizations, supporting community initiatives, doing transnational

00:01:59.500 projects, conducting equity trainings, and giving talks on alternatives. Teju is based in Oakland,

00:02:06.240 California, but often in other places because she goes where she is called.

00:02:10.800 Well, Teju, thank you so much for joining me today. I'd like to begin by highlighting the

00:02:20.580 importance of alternative geographies in Black geography and placemaking. Now, you've mentioned

00:02:26.020 that you're interested in mapping and documenting Black futures as being resilient and ecological

00:02:32.120 futures. So can you start by explaining how your work focuses on Black geography as a global

00:02:39.240 project, and why Just Transitions should be deeply attuned to geographies that exemplify

00:02:44.760 innovation and adaptability. Absolutely. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Ayana. I

00:02:51.000 really appreciate it. And everything you shared that was written about me and that I say about

00:02:58.020 myself has to do with the way that I understand space, place, and identity. In my understanding

00:03:05.460 of the work that I do and what is necessary to create a more equitable and sustainable society

00:03:12.880 has to do with how we understand space, how we understand power relations, and understand how

00:03:19.440 we position ourselves within these systems. And so my foundation sort of in Black geographies

00:03:26.560 and alternative geographies has a lot to do with the understanding of humanity and modernity and

00:03:32.660 the ways in which humans have created racialized structures and appropriated space in order to

00:03:40.640 usurp and appropriate power. And so Black geographies are human geographies because 0.89

00:03:45.960 we were humans before we were racialized as Black. And what also we can use Black geographies

00:03:52.040 to understand is the ways in which people have remade and reimagined their lack of space or the 0.67

00:04:00.540 spaces that they're given and have taken space, even though they're sort of constructed and

00:04:06.460 designed in ways that sometimes doesn't allow certain agencies. And I think racialization

00:04:12.500 really limits the agency of Black people, which has required innovation, resilience and resistance

00:04:19.320 innovation, and also working within the margins and remapping the way we understand space and

00:04:26.040 place and identity. And I think also this sort of correlation between the globalization of

00:04:32.560 Blackness, the creation of this social construction, and the ways in which that period of time

00:04:39.080 corresponded with colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, which had a lot to do with the

00:04:44.600 resource extraction and labor extraction. And it was sort of this reckoning of how we are

00:04:51.040 living in the world today, and some of the myriad injustices and inequities that have contributed

00:04:57.120 to climate change very much find their foundation in sort of colonialism, the transatlantic slave

00:05:04.040 trade, and the racialization of Blackness as it pertains to geographies, the literal remapping

00:05:09.960 of the world, starting with the remapping of Africa in 1848, and the way that the U.S. was

00:05:16.120 settled and other places in the Americas. So I really use Black geographies as a way to think 0.84

00:05:21.840 about how humans have constructed space and reconstruct space to maintain power for, say, 0.75

00:05:29.080 white supremacy or other forms of nationalism and oppression that we all experience and suffer from.

00:05:35.780 Does that answer your question, sort of? Oh my gosh, so articulately. Thank you for

00:05:41.860 just diving right in to these very deep and complex topics with us from the get-go. It was

00:05:49.820 such a wonderful introduction. And now I want to speak to your work, and especially as it centers

00:05:57.320 political, racial, and environmental justice. And of course, being from Oakland, I'd love to

00:06:03.740 transition to a conversation on gentrification. Now, I know many listeners are intimately familiar

00:06:09.560 with the lived experience of gentrification as it is now a global phenomenon. But I think something

00:06:17.140 that isn't discussed as much is the environmental impacts of gentrification, which to be clear,

00:06:22.680 should not supersede conversations on the social and cultural impacts, but should be accounted for

00:06:27.780 holistically. So I'd love if you could speak to the implications of constant urban growth in terms

00:06:34.180 of air quality, carbon emissions, and so on. And how are the areas that are being gentrified

00:06:39.900 also often areas that are unsuitable for such growth? Yes, absolutely. So as you said,

00:06:46.040 it's important to note that gentrification is a global phenomenon and has different manifestations

00:06:51.200 in different parts of the world, whether that's Brixton in London or Matonga in Brussels or even

00:06:57.780 in Cartagena, Colombia, which is a coastal city. And in the U.S., we see it very rapidly in the

00:07:04.480 Bay Area, where I am, in Oakland, in New York City, and even after Hurricane Katrina in New

00:07:09.460 Orleans as well. So it is something that is global primarily because it is a consequence

00:07:15.520 of capitalism. And gentrification in its current state is a consequence of what we call late

00:07:21.980 capitalism, which talks about the ways in which capitalism is embedded in all facets of culture.

00:07:27.780 So gentrification is heavily related to the identity of a space that is going to be appropriated.

00:07:35.500 So what makes it possible is that over time, certain places, be they neighborhoods, be

00:07:40.540 they communities, are devalued because of the type of people that live there, whether

00:07:45.340 it's working class and or people of color and or immigrant communities, whether it's

00:07:51.420 formerly industrial sites, which usually are surrounded by neighborhoods or working class

00:07:56.520 people who have worked on such sites live, or whether it's on land that is maybe in a precarious

00:08:02.460 location, like a coast, because of land erosion, or because people were literally pushed to the

00:08:08.640 margins. In the case of Black communities, because of the transatlantic slave trade,

00:08:13.200 many Black communities in the Americas live on coasts still, because that's where some of the

00:08:17.320 maroon communities were in, where escaped enslaved individuals went. So first of all,

00:08:22.620 gentrification takes place in land that has become devalued over time because of the type

00:08:28.480 of people that live there, right? There's no investment in that area. There is not a lot of

00:08:33.660 economic opportunities in that area. There may be just one big economic driver, whether it's a

00:08:38.940 refinery or some other industrial plant that was formerly there. And so over a course of some

00:08:45.020 decades, that property can then be purchased by real estate agencies or sometimes sold by the

00:08:51.040 cities themselves to developers at a very cheap price. And then they redevelop it with more hip

00:08:56.320 and trendy buildings. They usually add other services and necessities that weren't there

00:09:01.080 before, like gyms and cafes. And then that area, the property value increases. The people who are

00:09:07.500 there, the people who are seen as sort of disposable or devalued can't always continue

00:09:12.460 to afford to live there. And so they're pushed out and replaced by a different demographic,

00:09:16.700 usually one that is middle class, usually one that is whiter. And all of this is happening

00:09:22.440 through revitalization, in some cases is the term used, but that also implies heavy development,

00:09:29.360 heavy construction, heavy displacement. And the first wave of gentrification that I identify in

00:09:34.620 the U.S., in the Bay Area, particularly in the 60s, was the redevelopment of the Fillmore

00:09:39.840 neighborhood, which included the Gary Boulevard thoroughfare, which meant that eminent domain,

00:09:45.440 taking houses from people by the city, allowed for developers to come in and change the landscape

00:09:50.520 of the neighborhood. So through specific types of urban practices and urban policies,

00:09:56.340 gentrification is able to happen, which increases construction and development. And also in cases

00:10:02.760 of areas that were on toxic land or on waterfronts is putting us at greater risk for issues of

00:10:09.120 climate change and further creates carbon emissions. Because as we know, buildings account

00:10:15.700 for more than 30% of carbon emission outputs globally. We know that construction, particularly

00:10:22.800 hasty construction, using cheaper materials, using materials that maybe are shiny and nice,

00:10:28.140 but not good quality, increases toxins and increases risk. As with the Grenfell Tower in

00:10:34.900 london part of the reason why the fire spread so quickly was because they put a facade on the

00:10:40.500 building that was dangerous and flammable material because they wanted to make the tower look nicer

00:10:46.020 for the neighboring community which was a wealthy community right so even as we're revitalizing

00:10:51.940 and redeveloping quickly we're using materials that are more dangerous to people who live there

00:10:57.100 even if they may look shiny and new and nice in addition to increasing commutes that are caused

00:11:03.600 by displacement when people can no longer afford to live in the areas that they were living in and

00:11:08.000 working in, they have to move a little bit further out, sometimes a lot further out, which increases

00:11:12.360 their use of transportation, leaving them with less time to rest and to spend with family.

00:11:17.340 In addition to, in general, rampant homelessness, the use of sidewalks under freeways, really any

00:11:24.720 open space parks for homeless people to live. So you can't really control waste. You can't really

00:11:30.800 controlled strain on the environment. You can't even really be efficient in your use of space

00:11:36.240 because so many people can't afford to live in the spaces that are being developed.

00:11:40.080 So all of these issues work in tandem to make gentrification very environmentally unstable

00:11:46.600 in addition to its social and cultural impacts. And in my feeling about the way society works,

00:11:52.540 social, culture, and economic responses have a lot to do with our environment,

00:11:57.280 have a lot to do with space because space in this specific context is power and money.

00:12:03.280 And so I think when we're thinking about the environment and environmental issues,

00:12:07.040 we need to think about the strain urbanization already has on our ecologies and ecosystems.

00:12:12.500 So then we add the additional strain of gentrification and all the consequences of it,

00:12:17.460 such as mass pollution, mass displacement, mass homelessness,

00:12:21.480 then you're further exasperating the ecological strains that are already compounded by urbanization.

00:12:27.280 Oh, goodness. The visuals I was getting from your response of the development, which I've seen firsthand. And I'm sure all of us who are listening have seen the gentrification and the, quote, revitalization of areas. And yeah, building materials are completely toxic. So when they burn, all of that goes into the air and then down onto the soil. And it's just so important to be understanding gentrification through the myriad of lenses.

00:12:55.040 So thank you so much for explaining that to us. And now something we were speaking about

00:13:00.020 in our conversation before this conversation was about speculative investing. And so I'm

00:13:06.100 wondering if you could share with us how speculative investing contributes to this

00:13:10.040 problem and really highlights the absolute absurdity of this model of growth across all

00:13:14.560 industries. Absolutely. So as we think about what is usually termed revitalization and

00:13:23.060 redevelopment, we have to wonder where the money is coming from for this to happen. Because a lot

00:13:28.460 of times, cities that are experiencing gentrification, there is these public and

00:13:33.040 private partnerships, meaning public, the city, and private having to do with whether it's real

00:13:38.740 estate or investment agencies. And this allows cities to make some money or not have to spend

00:13:45.320 money as their place is getting redeveloped, and will hopefully bring in more economic investment,

00:13:51.120 Right. Which is the way that cities are thinking these days because of capitalism, wanting more investment, wanting more tourism, wanting more economic opportunities for certain people, not others, wanting to be seen as a global city, to be seen as the place to live.

00:14:06.420 We love these lists of the five less cities to live or the five best cities to visit or the 10 most smart cities, right?

00:14:14.640 And so this whole marketing and propaganda around revitalization and redeveloping cities and how we love these before and after comparisons.

00:14:24.380 Oakland was one of the most dangerous cities in the 90s, and now it's one of the highest grossing income cities, right?

00:14:30.980 That sort of dichotomy we love in society today.

00:14:34.600 And so I'll start by saying that this is about money, right? It's about getting money for certain

00:14:39.840 people and investing money in certain areas to increase the money that can be made. This is

00:14:45.380 about profits. And also a lot of cities don't always have budgets to do the redevelopment that

00:14:50.920 they may want to do. So even if they have good intentions, they will let in these sort of

00:14:55.660 speculative investment firms and these sort of real estate agencies that do a lot of redevelopment

00:15:01.720 so that they can do some of the things they may have wanted to do, but didn't have the economic

00:15:06.920 means to do. So it's not always that cities are inherently trying to just make money. Sometimes

00:15:11.820 they would like to redevelop their areas and fix roads, and they feel like they don't have the

00:15:16.680 money to do so. So speculative real estate has to do with the fact that there are people buying

00:15:22.060 whole buildings, there are companies buying whole blocks, buying whole neighborhoods,

00:15:26.620 and they are paying to build them and to redevelop the area and they put prices on the rent and the

00:15:35.140 mortgages that people who currently live there can't always afford and they're not even sure

00:15:40.680 if there will be enough people to fill those places that they're creating to fill the apartment

00:15:45.640 buildings that they're building and even if there are enough people which there are because there's

00:15:50.060 increased homelessness they can't afford to live in this place and so they're not actually

00:15:55.780 buying the property or creating the property to live in it themselves or for people who currently

00:16:01.600 exist in this place to be able to live in it. They're buying it with the hopes that wealthy

00:16:06.780 people will come to this area, middle-class people will come to this area and be able to afford

00:16:10.920 the increased or what they call market rents that these buildings that they're speculatively

00:16:15.960 developing have. So it's based on idealistic economic realities and not current structural

00:16:24.220 realities and not current housing market, but speculative housing market. So a housing market

00:16:29.340 in the future or a housing market in a place where most people are middle class. Most people

00:16:34.680 are wealthy. There are not people who are working class or impoverished who are living there. Of

00:16:39.020 course, they work there and do the service jobs, but they don't live there. So the idea is that

00:16:43.400 they can speculate on an area, on a price, and those people will come. So that is what makes

00:16:48.980 it dangerous because they're not actually building housing for people who are there. And in some

00:16:52.400 cases, these elites are coming from places in China and parts of Western Asia, what we call

00:16:59.060 the Middle East. Sometimes they're just very wealthy Americans and Europeans who are buying

00:17:03.920 apartments or investing in condos, investing in townhouses, investing in buildings that are not

00:17:10.120 necessarily currently affordable for the current landscape and will require new residents to come

00:17:15.460 in and purchase and or rent from them. It's just so ridiculous. And to think that there are people 0.91

00:17:22.380 who don't have homes when there's these speculative homes being built with nobody in

00:17:27.000 them. It's just complete insanity. And it really makes me think how gentrified spaces are being

00:17:34.080 fashioned in an expedited manner without any care for longevity or community or even survival.

00:17:40.980 And yeah, it leads me to wonder what a sustainable future looks like for urban areas.

00:17:45.620 As of 2017, it was calculated that over 4 billion people live in urban areas.

00:17:51.640 And so while many of us romanticize a return to the land or even think about the ways in which living off the land will aid us in our survival, I think we're failing to have a conversation about how urban areas can adapt for people who live in urban areas and would like to continue to do so.

00:18:10.480 So I'm wondering if you'd be comfortable speaking to this and do you foresee an undoing of once urbanized and gentrified spaces or an adaptation?

00:18:19.200 this is a really important question and I think what you said about gentrification was spot on

00:18:26.420 it is a lack of empathy and I know that sounds like an emotional response but lack of empathy

00:18:32.860 has a lot to do with the situation that we're in not only empathy for each other but empathy

00:18:38.020 for the land and other living species this idea that certain things just happen that they're not

00:18:43.460 by design and that there's no feelings about it. Cities change and they are revitalized,

00:18:50.260 redeveloped, left to be devalued. It's a cycle and there are no feelings involved. This idea

00:18:55.280 of the market, the market being a place that will regulate itself, which we know is not true,

00:19:00.380 that there are no feelings involved. And of course, this is all about our emotions and our

00:19:04.380 feelings about ourselves as humans, as animals, and about power and trying to have power over

00:19:10.920 everything. So as you said, more than half the world's population live in urban environments,

00:19:16.040 urban settlements, in cities. There is increasing urbanization, especially as climate change has

00:19:22.460 forced migration from rural and agricultural areas back to the city for economic opportunities

00:19:28.920 because they could no longer farm. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, which is a huge city,

00:19:34.280 has had almost a million climate refugees over the past years come from parts of the country

00:19:41.840 where because of increased natural disasters and soil erosion and salination in the soil,

00:19:48.240 they can no longer farm for subsistence. So they have to move into the cities and to the already 0.97

00:19:53.580 cramped capital city of Dhaka to find work. And they start to build their own housing and own

00:19:58.740 urban settlements because there's not enough housing, there's not enough space. And so not

00:20:04.120 only are we having to adapt for these intersections of economic immigration and climate immigration,

00:20:10.260 which are connected, but also in general for the ways in which our environment changing,

00:20:15.760 global warming, you can call it, or climate change will start to affect our cities more heavily. So

00:20:20.700 not only are they more dense, and density in this case is more ecological if it is done in an

00:20:27.800 efficient way, in an equitable way, in a way where people have the appropriate space and are not

00:20:32.420 creating spaces on top of each other and in undesirable places. And also we have to think

00:20:37.900 about what it means to adapt for the changing weather, for the unpredictability of what it's

00:20:45.520 going to be like every day, for the increasing damage that's done by natural disasters in places

00:20:51.480 in what we call the global South already experience a lot of natural disasters and climate change

00:20:57.900 induced environmental dangers. But in the West, for those of us who don't feel like we experience

00:21:05.080 the dangerous effects of climate change immediately, we're just kind of like,

00:21:09.160 should I wear a sweater today or not? And it's supposed to be colder in February, but it's not.

00:21:13.960 But as those start to increase and the weather becomes more extreme and more unpredictable,

00:21:18.780 We will have to find ways to adapt in cities. We'll have to find ways to live more aligned with each other, right, as humans and to work together. But also like what are the innovations, the ecosystems that we could try to regenerate the shifting of the economics of cities so that we're spending less time in air conditioned buildings and lights with offices on.

00:21:45.240 we're spending less time traveling back and forth across the country in a plane or even just back

00:21:50.620 and forth across the state of California in a plane. We're spending less time commuting in our

00:21:55.080 cars. We're having more pedestrian spaces in cities. We're having more bike friendly spaces

00:22:00.460 in cities, not bike friendly planned in ad hoc way, which is happening in Oakland, but bike

00:22:06.420 friendly meaning that people have access to bikes and space and to walking and to having to spend

00:22:11.360 less time in cars. They have heating that is not one dangerous for their health, right, because of

00:22:17.000 the fumes from heating, but that is also maybe solar powered or wind powered. How are we returning

00:22:23.880 to using urban spaces for urban gardening, for revitalizing and regenerating the ecologies that

00:22:33.360 were near because cities would not exist without surrounding agricultural ecologies, without

00:22:39.160 surrounding farming areas. So how do we reconnect to those areas and create a circular economy where

00:22:46.260 we're getting things locally and organic and we're not infusing them with toxins or pesticides?

00:22:52.260 What does it look like to live in communities that actually feel like communities where you're

00:22:58.180 sharing resources, whether that be collectively owned energy, where you're sharing food from the

00:23:03.880 community garden where you're sharing space, having cultural community centers where people

00:23:09.680 feel comfortable going to do dance and to do meditation and to get their mind in the right

00:23:14.660 place that it needs to be to work in this new framing of interdependence and slowing down and

00:23:21.820 consuming less and consuming differently and being interdependent. And so when I think about

00:23:27.920 urban futures, I think about the possibility to completely transform the way we've created

00:23:33.440 human settlements over time. Human settlements have shifted from ancient Mesopotamia to feudal

00:23:39.060 Europe to plantation systems in the U.S. They have shifted and we can continue to shift them 0.95

00:23:45.540 towards equity so that we have some hope for sustainability. And that really includes a

00:23:50.540 reframing, a paradigm shift in our mind about what it means to be urban, about what it means to be

00:23:57.300 a citizen, about what it means to be in relation to a man-made border, not an ecological border,

00:24:02.820 what it means to be having to adapt and reframe our privilege and to work with people who

00:24:08.920 previously we thought were much more different than us. So I'm thinking about a reframing of

00:24:13.880 space and reframing of identity in space and then placemaking, right? How do we remake place

00:24:19.480 to align with the values and the justice that we know is necessary to give us continuity? Because

00:24:26.400 after all, nature does what it must to continue. Yes, there is tensions. Yes, there is killing.

00:24:32.820 Yes, there is eating. Yes, there is sex. But nature will continue. And humans have gone against nature. And that's why our continuity is at stake. 0.97

00:24:40.760 So we need to remind ourselves that we are part of nature, right? We are just flowers. In a sense, we've forgotten ourselves so that we can continue as well.

00:24:49.360 And continuity cannot happen with unlimited growth, with mass extraction, with this idea of scaling. Plants grow, but they don't scale.

00:24:57.500 We need to take back the word growth even because it's been appropriated by capitalist language to mean this unlimited thing that has no borders for people who are rich but has very well-defined borders for people who are poor.

00:25:11.380 It has meant that things can continuously scale and be devoid of place-based and culturally relevant and nuanced specificities.

00:25:19.800 It means that the global community doesn't have any say in how the market, quote-unquote, regulates itself.

00:25:27.500 So we have to not only take back the language, but take back our idea of what it means to continue and what it means to consume continuously and what it means to extract resources.

00:25:39.620 We have to give back what we are taking so that there is more to take.

00:25:42.920 And then if we give back, there will be more to take.

00:25:45.000 But right now we are not giving back.

00:25:46.580 Many of us are not.

00:25:47.700 Indigenous people have understood these cycles for millennia.

00:25:51.280 That's why they've been stewards of this land.

00:25:52.800 But we have disrupted that spiritual connection to it.

00:25:55.520 And so we've forgotten ourselves.

00:25:56.780 And that's why we're in the situation we're in. So adapting in the urban sense is about human continuity and human continuity can only happen if we start to understand the ecologies and ecosystems that we are trying to have power over and that we have already disrupted with our urbanization in the first place.

00:26:26.780 Don't sway and they'll betray, watch them, don't stop and lose you, she said times would

00:26:44.700 It will take away things you want to stay, but that's just a day.

00:27:02.500 I'm noticing across the globe, we're really witnessing a coalescing of nationalism.

00:27:31.520 populism, and environmentalism, which is to say that once again, environmental fears are being

00:27:38.140 used to promote anti-immigrant and white supremacist frameworks. Whether it's the

00:27:44.120 El Paso shooter who targeted the Latinx community while espousing that in order for life to become 0.96

00:27:49.580 more sustainable, we have to get rid of enough people, or French politician Jordan Bardella 0.88

00:27:55.260 citing borders as the environment's greatest ally. It is undeniable that ecological ideas

00:28:02.720 and misanthropic tendencies are revitalizing racial and ethnic divisions. As someone who

00:28:10.000 strongly reiterates that reality that, quote, there is no separate survival, can you speak

00:28:15.920 to how these misplaced fears amongst global populations are actually only to the benefit

00:28:21.260 of an elite minority. Absolutely. So environmental extraction works alongside the racialization of

00:28:30.380 certain communities, particularly indigenous black and brown communities, because it refers to

00:28:36.960 this idea that there is not enough. And so we need to take more than we need because we are hoarding

00:28:45.600 it because there is not enough. So there is a fabricated scarcity so that a few people can

00:28:51.560 hoard while the rest of us fight each other for what is left, which is why I believe in collective

00:28:57.580 ownership and the commons. I don't think that will solve everything, but it's a start because part of

00:29:02.400 the problem is privatization of natural resources, things that should not be able to be bought

00:29:08.740 like water, like air, because of the privatization of resources, there needs to be a way to justify

00:29:16.780 certain people having a lot more than other people. And one of the ways we can justify

00:29:23.000 certain people having a lot more than other people is by saying certain people are inferior

00:29:28.500 and other people are superior. And it's not that we're saying that in explicit language,

00:29:34.540 It's that we're creating and designing structures that allow a small percentage of mostly white American and European men owning huge amounts of wealth, while white and black and Asian and other racialized people who are not wealthy elites are fighting about who deserves what and who worked for what and who needs to work harder and who deserves certain rights.

00:30:03.000 certain aspects of humanity, and that allows a very small group of mostly white, mostly men,

00:30:10.340 mostly Western elites to hoard wealth. Meanwhile, the divisions that exist among the rest of us

00:30:16.920 will almost surely limit our ability to organize together against the elite wealth, right? So there

00:30:25.920 needs to be a way that poor white person in Appalachia does not identify with a poor Black

00:30:32.200 person in Georgia, because if they realize that they have more in common with each other

00:30:37.780 than that poor white man has with Trump, and that the people who exist in Trump's world do not care

00:30:44.220 that you're white or black, they would like to have wealth, then they can make sure that you

00:30:49.880 don't try to take what is theirs and redistribute it among the rest of us, right? And so it's about 0.83

00:30:56.000 hoarding power in order to make wealth. And connecting this sort of racialized identity

00:31:03.740 to the environment will most certainly allow this to continue because our environment is what's most 0.71

00:31:10.080 immediate to us. It's what we survive off of. So if you can make it seem like an environmental

00:31:15.120 issue when really you're just trying to use that to disguise systems of power, then it allows you

00:31:21.100 to continue to do what you're doing at the expense of other humans. And so people who are not at all

00:31:26.300 in positions of power, who are not at all having access to wealth, feel as if they can identify

00:31:32.640 with these people based on socially constructed racial categories. And then they enact violence

00:31:38.020 essentially for the elites, on people who should really be their allies, to people who should

00:31:42.520 really be their comrades, on people who are in a more similar situation than them. But this mentality,

00:31:48.120 this paradigm, this racialized idea of identity and white supremacy and nationalism and populism

00:31:54.640 has completely eradicated a sort of class analysis, a sort of understanding that we as

00:32:01.900 working class people, as even middle class people to some extent, and even as the less wealthy but

00:32:07.540 rich people have more in common than the very small percentage of mostly white, mostly Western,

00:32:14.900 mostly men who own great swaths of wealth based on the exploitation of all of our labor because

00:32:22.220 our wages are not equal to the amount of value that the products we produce actually have.

00:32:28.900 So we don't even feel purpose in our work because we don't have ownership of it because

00:32:33.540 we're told what to do.

00:32:34.960 We feel like we have limited agency and because we're paid not based on the value of what

00:32:39.560 we produce, but based on the wages that were decided by people who own this private capital

00:32:45.020 that should really belong to all of us. So when we understand the class structures involved,

00:32:51.540 we know that anything and everything, especially the climate, especially the environment,

00:32:57.460 especially public health as it pertains to coronavirus, will automatically reinforce

00:33:02.320 systems of white supremacy, systems of populism and white-wing conservatism that only benefit

00:33:09.220 a very small part of the population, right?

00:33:11.920 And so we have to think about how the way that humans have created their relationship

00:33:17.300 to power, they will use everything around them to reinforce those relationships to power

00:33:21.960 and the environment.

00:33:23.200 But we need to live the most foundational piece of humanity, which is the earth, which

00:33:28.460 is the environment, is now weaponized against people who should be seeing themselves in

00:33:34.600 each other in order to create a future where we can all together overthrow, if you will,

00:33:39.800 the systems of extraction and wealth hoarding that be. So I think I kind of answered your question

00:33:46.380 about those sort of intersections. And I just say that to say that the geography of the environment

00:33:53.280 will always be weaponized for power. And that's why we have to rethink and reclaim

00:33:59.160 our understanding of environment and our understanding of geography in general and

00:34:04.640 knowing that most political borders, most nation states are only a couple hundred years old. So we

00:34:10.920 have very short memory of humans. There have been so many systems before the capitalist nation state

00:34:16.380 system that we have now. Just 500 years ago, there was a different understanding of the map. Just

00:34:21.800 600 years ago, there were countries that were not countries, that were communities, that were tribes,

00:34:27.860 that were settlements that now exist under certain rules of law, under certain borders

00:34:33.320 that were created and drawn.

00:34:35.380 So if we can remap our brains and our understanding of history, then we could certainly remap our

00:34:40.840 current understanding of the environment, which is so heavily embedded with racism and

00:34:45.720 classism.

00:34:47.600 Wow, Teju, that was really, I think you did answer the question.

00:34:52.180 And I think you also expressed beyond the question.

00:34:55.560 And that was really stunning to hear. So thank you. And I want to speak to your positionality

00:35:05.500 statement as you write, quote, as I seek out alternative spaces of belonging and pathways

00:35:11.580 to a co-collaborative collective future, I am acutely aware that inclusion is not enough.

00:35:18.440 We need co-creation. As I continued to search for the other world, I realized that some of us,

00:35:24.500 those of us deemed other are the other world, end quote. And I'd like to take this opportunity

00:35:29.820 to explore the differences between co-creation versus inclusion, because I feel that in the

00:35:35.880 dominant culture, we're still very much caught up in the terminology of diversity and inclusion.

00:35:42.160 So I'm wondering, what does the practice of co-creation look like for you?

00:35:47.520 So as you started the previous question, you used the quote, there is no separate survival.

00:35:53.140 That is a quote from a friend of mine, Nadia Nadasen, who went to my master's program with me, and she shared that as an affirmation. And I think of it as an affirmation as well as a warning.

00:36:05.860 And so when we're thinking about our positionality, when we're thinking about investing in co-creation and not just inclusion and diversity, we have to think about the literal reality that if we continue to be separated and divided based on hoarding power privileges and racialized hierarchies, then we will not survive.

00:36:27.160 Very literally, we will not survive. And so what does it mean when we are thinking about diversity and inclusion, yet we haven't changed the way we do the work, yet we haven't changed whose decision making matters most, yet we haven't changed our funding structures and what we're able to fund.

00:36:49.720 And so when we think about inclusion and diversity, they are essentially only theoretical if we don't know what that means for practice. And so co-creation, which is, in my opinion, the practice of inclusion, diversity and equity means that we are not bringing people into the fold, but thinking about what the fold is that we created and how do we change it completely so that rather than bringing people in, we are building something new with others.

00:37:18.140 And so it's about recreating, reimagining and refashioning the way that we do work along with the people who we know are necessary for the future that we want to coexist in.

00:37:31.600 And so it's not just about bringing in more people of color or talking to more people who maybe identify in ways that I identify. It's about talking with me and working with me and saying, how do we build completely new systems where you don't feel like you're on the margins, where you don't feel like because of how you look, you're devalued.

00:37:52.720 When you don't feel like because of who you love that you cannot belong in a space, how do we together recreate something from the bottom that is non-hierarchical, that is uncolonial, that is non-patriarchal, that in fact is non-binary, that doesn't rely on these dichotomies of black and white, that doesn't rely on these dichotomies of poor and rich, that relies on cooperation, collaboration.

00:38:18.940 And that doesn't necessarily mean consensus, right? I don't think we need consensus necessarily to work together, but we need to be in the space together where everyone's voice is equally heard and everyone's experience is equally valid.

00:38:32.400 And we recognize that there is not a sense of objectivity or neutrality. All of us are subjective. All of our politics are identity politics, whether you're white, whether you're black, whether you don't identify with the race.

00:38:45.500 all politics are identity politics because we all have an identity. And the way that we position

00:38:50.920 ourselves in that identity, whether that's acknowledging or not acknowledging certain

00:38:55.420 social constructs that we live in, our politics are deeply personal. And so when we think about

00:39:01.280 creating things together, not just next to, not just bringing in a few more people who look

00:39:07.720 different from us or who grew up with less than us or who grew up with more than us,

00:39:11.000 we have to think about how do we work with people who may think that what we're doing is not the

00:39:17.540 right thing, even if we were so attached to the idea that we had the right intention.

00:39:22.120 And so it's important to think about how can we change our intentions so that we could change

00:39:26.720 our outcomes? How do we change the processes? How do we reimagine the way to functionalize equity

00:39:32.300 so that the outcomes actually reflect what is necessary for new futures? And the outcomes

00:39:37.840 will most certainly mean you are not in the position

00:39:39.940 that you think you're in now.

00:39:41.680 And that's fine because there's enough for all of us.

00:39:44.120 Scarcity is by design.

00:39:45.620 But if we are still trying to hoard power,

00:39:48.160 then we include people, we bring them in,

00:39:50.320 we have diversity, we add more,

00:39:51.980 but we don't actually change the way we do the work

00:39:55.440 and change the power dynamics of who can make decisions,

00:39:58.720 whose strategy is seen as valid,

00:40:00.880 whose positioning is seen as being objective

00:40:03.240 versus who positioning is seen as being subjective.

00:40:06.060 Everyone is subjective.

00:40:07.840 Right. Objectivity is a very specific hegemonic framework used in academia to allow those of us who don't think of ourselves as other to study those who we think of as other, other being inferior, other being not civilized, other being not economic, other being not geographic.

00:40:26.400 It's all of these things that in the Western context, we don't see ourselves as being. But in the Western context, because of globalization and because of colonialism and imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade, because of that, there are pieces of the other in the West.

00:40:43.740 There are pieces of those of us deemed other who have created and constructed the literal buildings of places in the West.

00:40:53.500 It is the labor of the other being my ancestors who literally constructed the architecture of a lot of this country.

00:41:00.960 It is the other, the indigenous people who stewarded these lands for centuries so that people could settle here and extract all of the regeneration that they created and worked in tandem with nature with for several centuries, right?

00:41:17.680 So this idea of the other being right here, being not at the margins, but in the very center of the geographies that we exist in, tapping into, acknowledging, seeing us, those of us deemed other in the center of these kind of Western hegemonic structures allows us to rethink how we can live, encourages us to rethink about how we can collaborate differently,

00:41:44.140 allows us to rethink about our relation to power and our feelings of scarcity and our

00:41:48.840 uncomfortableness with our privilege. So when we realize that the other world, the world that some

00:41:56.160 of us are trying to get to that is just as more equitable, actually is already existing in some

00:42:00.780 of these spaces, sometimes because of oppression and exclusion and trauma, and sometimes because

00:42:06.660 people who identify as Black and Brown and Indigenous know what the future could be like

00:42:11.840 based on these ancient ancestral lineages, which were more regenerative in some cases.

00:42:16.800 So having those of us deemed other or those of us who identify as feeling othered within

00:42:22.780 the current landscape, recognizing that we have been here and we have been innovating

00:42:28.000 and we have been adapting and we have been resisting and that those tools, adapting,

00:42:33.580 being resilient, resisting, innovating, using less than we have are the same tools that

00:42:41.300 we need to create an equitable future. I mean, soul food is a great example. The master scraps

00:42:46.900 were left and black people created this amazing, very delicious food, which eaten in mass is not 1.00

00:42:53.080 good for the health, but right. It was because of the scraps that they created what needed to be a 1.00

00:42:58.940 celebration and to taste good. And so we don't have to use the scraps because there's enough

00:43:02.980 for all of us. If some of us give up things that we're hoarding and if some of us allow others to

00:43:09.660 come in and maybe take the lead and in some cases help us give away some of the things that we don't

00:43:16.660 necessarily need. If we let other people come in and talk to us in a way that makes us feel

00:43:22.260 uncomfortable, if we let people come in and share space with us and make the space as safe as it can

00:43:29.100 be for the others, then we're going to really have some opportunities for survival. So just including

00:43:35.940 people, just having people there, just being next to people is not enough to change the outcome.

00:43:42.500 So we have to co-create. We really have to co-create. And part of what's scary about

00:43:46.880 co-creation is that we have to start over. And no one likes to start over. But I believe that

00:43:52.540 in order to do what's right, we have to start over. That is my positioning. And that is why

00:43:57.640 that is in the statement, because I believe it's the only way. And so a lot of my work has to do

00:44:03.520 with repositioning people and acknowledging their position and helping them understand if we remap

00:44:09.360 our mindset and our brains, then we could remap our relationship to the environment and create

00:44:14.940 more collaborative and co-dependent and co-creative spaces. Yeah. As I prepared for

00:44:22.040 this interview, I was particularly struck by two issues you further in your writing.

00:44:26.980 The first being that charity cannot be conflated with justice. And recently, we've certainly seen this happening with climate change, where billionaires who've made their wealth through extraction are now donating meager amounts to the so-called fight on climate change.

00:44:44.380 And so I'd like to discuss this topic in conversation to a powerful article you wrote titled, Nipsey Hussle's Geographies, Remapping the Hood and Opportunities for Black Space, wherein you write, quote, Nipsey's death is a crucial reminder that spatial inequity is a form of violence.

00:45:03.140 When our environment is designed so that we are not able to thrive, we end up killing each other in an attempt to claim a little piece of what should be all of ours, but few have access to.

00:45:14.440 Around the world, but in the case of the United States, the forsaking of poor neighborhoods and self-built communities is a form of environmental and psychological violence, end quote.

00:45:24.340 So perhaps you could speak to why and how we need to move away from the philanthropic endeavors to a reprioritization of collective ownership and how that physically changes community and space.

00:45:37.000 So charity is not justice. Philanthropy in general exists because there is systemic structural inequality. In order for people to have great swaths of money to give away, it's because through the exploitation of labor and the mass extraction of resources, they have been able to acquire more than they can work for.

00:45:58.580 There's some statistics rolling around the Internet about how many thousands of lifetimes you'd have to work to amass the amount of wealth that Jeff Bezos has to disconnect this idea of working hard to wealth.

00:46:12.660 Because as we know in this country, those who work the hardest often are not the wealthiest because poverty is systemic.

00:46:20.520 It's institutionalized. Poverty fuels capitalism because without having a huge impoverished class, you can't have the mass amounts of wealth being hoarded by a few people.

00:46:33.260 And so when we see acts of charity, when we see people who have amassed a lot of wealth, usually in this case in problematic ways, we are so excited about it because we're programmed to think that they're giving away what they have earned themselves.

00:46:50.520 And so when you give away something you've earned yourself, you're seen as being altruistic, as being apathetic.

00:46:56.420 Right. But as you said, Ayana, most of these people have amassed wealth from the very environmental decorative practices that have given them the wealth.

00:47:05.680 So giving money away to an environmental issue when what you do and how you do it specifically how you do it creates more environmental issues is not actually solving the problem of the environmental issue.

00:47:19.740 Right. So it's not that you're necessarily not a good person for giving away your tax benefit money, giving away the money that you did not amass by working for it hard by yourself.

00:47:33.260 It's not that you're bad just because you give charity, even though you've amassed wealth in a way that is extractive and exploitive. It's just that we should really think about what redistribution means rather than charity, which is necessarily predicated upon systematic poverty.

00:47:54.100 So charity doesn't solve the root of the problem. The fact that charity has to be such a huge industry, right? Development aid, philanthropy, charity are huge industries because they show how through those lenses, through those methods, we don't actually solve poverty.

00:48:11.620 If we actually solved poverty through philanthropy, then there would be no more poverty, right? Because then there wouldn't be philanthropy. So you need poverty and philanthropy. That's the point of that statement.

00:48:21.700 But what I'm getting at here is that when we rethink, I'm saying that so much, but it's really true, when we rethink and reframe wealth distribution as something that is going to be radical, something that's not connected to tax breaks, something that's not connected to a wealthy few giving away a very meager portion of their wealth, their wealth that continues to compound.

00:48:48.480 when we think about actually changing economic structure so that people cannot accumulate mass

00:48:54.440 amounts of wealth at the expense of mass amounts of people, then we're really thinking about what

00:49:00.340 it means to redistribute our wealth and redistribute the mass amounts of wealth that

00:49:05.640 comes from resource extraction and labor. So there's no way to do redistribution with

00:49:10.900 philanthropy unless philanthropists and philanthropic organizations give away all of

00:49:15.580 their money in a way that inspires and encourages and functionalizes regenerative neighborhoods,

00:49:22.700 regenerative communities, rather than allows them to keep amassing wealth and giving it away

00:49:28.280 in very structured, specific, and limiting ways. So Nipsey Hussle, my brother's favorite rapper,

00:49:34.560 was a good example of what it looks like to actually own the spaces that you have lived in

00:49:40.640 and be able to create in them what the community really needs, not what's imposed on them from the

00:49:46.360 city government or from real estate agencies or from speculative developers. And so Nipsey Hussle,

00:49:52.180 having grown up in that neighborhood, knew exactly what the neighborhood needed. It needed activities.

00:49:56.340 It needed shops. It needed places for people to congregate and hang out that were safe. It needed

00:50:03.060 places for families to go to have fun. And so he was thinking about not just like my hood, right,

00:50:09.660 Because we always say my hood or my neighborhood, but what does it actually mean when it's our

00:50:14.220 hood, when we create what's there, when we benefit from what's there, when we feel safe

00:50:19.360 there, when we have economic opportunities there, what does my hood then really feel

00:50:24.220 like?

00:50:24.740 It's not just this idea about feeling like it's your hood, but having the possibility

00:50:29.520 to change what happens there, to create things that will allow you to thrive there, to create

00:50:35.020 things that will allow you to be safe there, and to create things that are regenerative

00:50:39.340 and don't require these influxes of aid and charity

00:50:44.780 that don't actually get at

00:50:46.460 the structural root causes of the problem.

00:50:49.460 So I think philanthropy is important and significant

00:50:52.520 for the period of time our societies are at right now.

00:50:55.980 Yes, give away your money,

00:50:57.640 but please also stop doing the practices

00:51:01.020 and supporting the systems

00:51:02.420 that have created the foundations and families

00:51:05.440 and few wealthy people I was talking about before

00:51:07.980 to amass great amounts of wealth and don't give them a high five because all they're doing is

00:51:13.240 redistributing what we should all collectively own, what they didn't work for by themselves.

00:51:18.120 So we don't need to give Jeff Bezos a clap up for donating however much he donated to the

00:51:23.740 environment. We need to give Jeff Bezos a clap up when he makes Amazon a cooperatively owned

00:51:29.560 company that doesn't have warehouses shipping things in two days with all the pollution that

00:51:34.600 that causes and all the emissions that that causes when every employee has health care,

00:51:39.680 because the first thing he did when he became CEO was take away health care from all part-time

00:51:43.660 employees, even if they were working 32 hours. So we need to clap it up when the actual capital,

00:51:50.340 when the actual things that we are using and need to live are given back to all of us and

00:51:56.380 cooperatively owned. We don't need to be high-fiving philanthropy for justice, because if it is truly

00:52:02.140 justice, then we will not need philanthropy. Yeah. And I think it's important to remember

00:52:08.160 that people who donate big sums of money or philanthropists, they also get a tax break.

00:52:14.540 It's not just giving money. It's beneficial for their businesses. The money that Jeff Bezos gave

00:52:20.980 away, I'm sure it supported him in some way and it supported his friends. So the nonprofit

00:52:28.080 an industrial complex philanthropic industrial complex it's a way to also pat each other like

00:52:33.740 the people in their circles on their own backs you know it's really convoluted back there and i

00:52:39.980 yeah and for them to keep their wealth the tax breaks allow them to not pay as many taxes

00:52:45.240 the public development and so then they could continue to amass wealth and not have to give

00:52:50.780 it away so even the fact that tax breaks allow them to give away less wealth and then through

00:52:55.580 giving away wealth, right? What we see is giving away wealth. They're not giving away wealth,

00:52:59.240 they're giving away money. So the difference between charity and systemic restructuring

00:53:04.160 is that you would redistribute wealth and not give away money, if that makes sense.

00:53:09.940 Absolutely. I think that's a really important distinction. And yeah, it is really messy back

00:53:17.280 in that system. And it definitely needs to be shifted completely. So thanks for speaking to

00:53:22.760 that. And yeah, as a creative writer and a poet who has also been trained in the academic field

00:53:28.720 of geography, I'm hoping we can turn to the function of language. And what I mean is the

00:53:34.300 ways in which many of us take on language that is assumed to have power and promise.

00:53:38.820 And I'll speak for myself in that there's increasing pressure to use a certain type of

00:53:43.020 language when having these conversations. So I'd like to ask about the limitations you find

00:53:49.020 within this imposed language and how our wording might be preventative to co-creation.

00:53:55.100 So the irony about language is that our whole conversation will be exclusionary to so many

00:54:01.780 people because of the ways that we're talking, because of the ways that I'm connecting things,

00:54:07.700 because of the phrases that I'm using, because of my accent, because of my inflections,

00:54:12.960 because of my articulations, all of these will affect who was able to listen and follow this

00:54:19.940 conversation. So even in what we're doing right now, there are immense amounts of limits and it

00:54:26.360 is exclusionary, not to the effect of academia, right? Maybe not to that sort of level, especially

00:54:32.700 because resources will be provided, but just because of the type of language we know how to

00:54:37.580 use, we've been raised using the way that we speak, how we're speaking to each other,

00:54:42.200 how we're understanding each other. So language is all of these things.

00:54:46.660 The other thing that I'll say is I speak English. English is my first language. It's the language

00:54:51.360 that I am fluent in. It is a language that the people who were enslaved, captured from the

00:54:57.500 continent of Africa, were not speaking when they were brought here to the Americas, in my case,

00:55:04.440 to Jamaica and the United States. So even my language is a colonial language, which means

00:55:11.580 I don't have words, not in a colonized language to describe myself, to think about who I am,

00:55:17.380 to think about my relationship to nature, to think about my relationship to time, right? And so even

00:55:22.980 our language limits what we're able to even talk about and how we're able to talk about it. I have

00:55:28.860 a lot of friends in Europe who do work on Blackness and Black racialization. And because in certain 0.59

00:55:35.040 languages, there is not the racial term for Black, there's not the same terms that we can use in

00:55:40.740 English, they speak and write in English to reach a wider audience, to have language to describe

00:55:46.640 their subjective situation. But of course, translation is limited. You can't describe

00:55:51.300 everything through translation. You can't get the nuances. You can't get the feelings. You can't

00:55:56.460 always get the cultural specificity. So me speaking English, speaking a colonial language,

00:56:01.680 speaking an imperialistic language already means that I'm asserting certain power because there

00:56:06.560 people across the world who will not be able to understand what I'm saying just because of

00:56:11.160 the fact that I'm speaking English and then the type of English that I'm speaking.

00:56:15.240 No doubt I am influenced by academia. Both my parents have PhDs. I myself have a master's and

00:56:21.480 I've spent a lot of time doing research in academia where you are encouraged to use jargon.

00:56:25.860 You're encouraged to say things in these theoretical, dense, roundabout ways rather

00:56:29.620 than just saying the thing. When you're encouraged to use phrases which refer to phrases which refer

00:56:34.120 phrases from a whole book based on a whole person's work, like intersectionality. And then

00:56:38.440 we forget what it meant in the first place and what it was a framework for. And we just expect

00:56:42.880 that people know what we're talking about when we say certain things. So in that sense, language is

00:56:47.300 limiting for a variety of reasons, and especially colonial language. I think the other thing is that

00:56:53.240 we don't really want people to understand what we're saying, right? That is sort of the ethos,

00:56:59.020 in my opinion, of academia. Because if people understand what we're really saying, then we'd

00:57:03.880 have to include them in what we're really saying. And we couldn't just research them and talk about

00:57:08.140 them. We'd have to talk with them if they knew what we were actually saying. So it's also a way,

00:57:12.540 in my opinion, to cut off the ability for co-collaboration, for co-creation, because

00:57:17.680 certain people don't even know what we're talking about. So I always say that I've taken a break

00:57:22.320 from academic publishing because I can't write academically to the point necessary where people

00:57:27.140 that I'm talking about don't even know that I'm talking about them and I'm supposed to be talking

00:57:30.980 with them and about us, not them, right? Even that dichotomy of there's a them that we're talking

00:57:35.860 about and there's a us that is neutral and that is objective. So even the language creating the

00:57:41.280 barriers between who was part of the conversation, who was part of the discourse and who was not part

00:57:45.800 of the conversation, who was not part of the discourse, who doesn't even understand the

00:57:49.540 conversation. And so one of the things I remember asking you before we had this conversation

00:57:55.220 was about what type of language I could use to be as accessible to as many people as possible.

00:58:03.920 And we kind of agreed that I should speak in the way that I speak, which in some ways is inaccessible

00:58:09.460 to mass amounts of people and allows me to think through certain ideas and complexities

00:58:15.520 and not oversimplify in some cases, but also means that a lot more people will not be able

00:58:21.740 to just listen to this long, dense conversation and know exactly what my point is or what I'm

00:58:27.080 saying about movement building or what I'm saying about transitioning the climate and our environment.

00:58:32.980 So I struggle with language all the time because I'm a writer. And so I write about these

00:58:39.380 things that can be complex and misunderstood. And because I speak English and because I come from

00:58:45.700 an academic background, I come from an artist intellectual background, I come from an activist

00:58:50.880 intellectual background in the communities that I was raised in, in Oakland specifically. So it's

00:58:57.200 even hard for me to think about how I can speak in a way that's more accessible. And I do speak

00:59:02.780 differently depending on where I am and who I'm talking to and what I'm trying to say and what

00:59:06.960 my intention is and what I want the outcome to be. And as a poet, there is some sort of

00:59:12.520 flexibility because you can use words not to necessarily mean what they mean, but to incite

00:59:17.460 a feeling, to incite an understanding, to communicate familiarity, to communicate subjectivities,

00:59:24.140 to communicate the depth of things. So one of my favorite lines from a poem I wrote is,

00:59:30.040 when the giant wave comes washing over our bodies, Black people become mermaids and Indigenous 1.00

00:59:36.060 people become seeds. What will you become? Right? So just in that sentence, I'm talking about climate 0.99

00:59:42.160 change. I'm talking about the fact that Black communities live on coastlines. I'm talking about 0.96

00:59:47.000 speculative geography in the case of if in an imaginary sci-fi world, black people didn't die

00:59:53.060 when the sea levels rose, but instead we became mermaids and created underwater societies and

00:59:57.740 adapted our blackness. I'm talking about indigenous people being stewards of this land and being the

01:00:03.260 ones who seeded what we now can extract today. So in that sentence, I'm not saying all the things I

01:00:09.260 just said to explain the sentence, but people could somehow feel that I'm talking about something

01:00:13.960 that is very important to our existential sense of self, that is very important to how we think

01:00:20.060 we fit into this equation, that is very important to how we understand what is going to happen to

01:00:26.580 all of us, what is very important to how we understand life and death and afterlife and

01:00:32.000 history and geography. And so I think poetry gives me more possibilities than writing articles,

01:00:38.400 but then also means that it's up for interpretation, that people may not fully understand,

01:00:43.280 that people may think I'm talking about the black version of the Little Mermaid, that people may be

01:00:47.400 confused about how indigenous people become seeds. There's so many interpretations. People may think

01:00:51.880 of Octavia Butler. There's so many things that could be interpreted from that sentence. So while

01:00:56.680 it allows a sense of feeling to come over people, it also is limited. So I use these different

01:01:02.980 content mediums, speaking, writing, poetry, in order to think about the different ways that I

01:01:09.220 could use the limits of language and try to create less limits for language. But we need a

01:01:13.240 new language entirely, something that is not just about speaking audibly, but other things, sounds,

01:01:20.800 touch, conversation, nature, air, smells, words in different languages, learning other languages

01:01:28.400 more, speaking other languages more, thinking about translation more. Because when you speak

01:01:33.280 another language, you're forced to think about what you're really trying to say. And you're

01:01:36.960 forced to think about not only what you're really trying to say, but will the other person understand

01:01:41.040 it. So when you're learning a new language, what's most important is, well, the people who speak that

01:01:44.820 language fluently understand what I'm saying. When we speak English to each other, when we assume

01:01:49.580 people speak English, we're not so caught up in, will they understand what I'm trying to say? We're

01:01:54.120 just caught up in what we're saying, right? So even this sort of narcissism of an imperial language

01:01:59.100 like English, that we're going to say whatever we're going to say, and people have to understand

01:02:02.280 it. And that's a lack of empathy. So also thinking about how we can use language to create more

01:02:07.180 empathy, which will then hopefully change the way that we do things, which will then hopefully

01:02:11.200 create an expansion of language and outside of colonial bounds, outside of Western designations.

01:02:18.980 My friend was telling me that there are several words in different languages. I think most notably

01:02:25.280 I heard about it in some South Asian languages that the word for today and tomorrow was the same

01:02:30.900 word and that the way you knew what they were talking about was the context. So even our

01:02:35.720 understanding of time as being linear and yet in some languages the word that breaks this linear

01:02:41.980 idea of time is the same word for today and tomorrow and so what does that even mean about

01:02:47.280 how we experience time so anyways i'm going down a rabbit hole but yes language is limiting

01:02:53.060 language is exclusionary and yet it is our role as people who use language as people who primarily

01:03:00.200 exist in spoken or signed language to find ways to expand it so more people can participate

01:03:06.820 in this discourse, in this cooperative process.

01:03:30.200 guitar solo

01:04:00.200 well thank you for going down that wormhole because yeah it's important for us to consider

01:04:13.000 these things when we're trying to connect with each other and we're trying to build

01:04:18.020 new systems and tear down the old ones of how we relate how we connect how language separates us

01:04:24.740 but at the same time brings us together. It is a kind of vortex of a thought process. So thank you

01:04:31.300 for taking us down there with you. Now, this strays from where our conversation has been,

01:04:36.500 but I came across an article you co-authored titled, How Freeway Revolts Helped Create the

01:04:42.200 People's Environmental Law. And most recently, the Trump administration announced that federal

01:04:47.700 agencies should no longer take climate change into account when looking at the impact of

01:04:52.780 infrastructure projects through the National Environmental Policy Act. So it's just crazy,

01:04:59.140 but I'd love if you could speak to the importance of NEPA, its origin, and what this grave overhaul

01:05:04.920 means. So NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act. It was voted on unanimously in 1969

01:05:13.100 and enacted in 1970. One of the things that NEPA does is require the state government and now other

01:05:20.980 companies to do an environmental impact study when they're about to do a project in a community

01:05:28.160 or nearby neighborhood. And so what this means is that theoretically, the community or the residents

01:05:35.780 from the nearby neighborhood have a say in how the project will negatively and or positively

01:05:42.520 impact their environment. Now, usually when people have a say, it's because it will negatively

01:05:48.600 impact their environment, or they feel like they were not involved in the process.

01:05:52.480 But why this is important is because as I was talking about the designing of spaces,

01:05:57.680 the appropriation of spaces, and how urban planning and revitalization and redevelopment

01:06:02.160 has remapped some of our spaces, they also have specifically been as a way to further

01:06:10.340 disenfranchise and further marginalize certain people. So the origins of NEPA is that in the

01:06:16.460 1960s, there was something called the freeway revolts, where across the US, residents, not just

01:06:23.580 Black people, Black people, Latinx people, white people, in some cases, were revolting, were

01:06:29.480 resisting, were using civil disobedience and direct action against these proposed freeways that were 0.93

01:06:35.400 supposed to go through their neighborhoods. So I mentioned the Gary Boulevard thoroughfare

01:06:39.960 in the Fillmore neighborhood, but this was happening all across the country. And the reason

01:06:44.720 why it was happening was because after World War II, several millions of African Americans migrated

01:06:50.640 from the South to the Northeast, to the North, to the Midwest, to the Northwest for more economic

01:06:58.080 opportunities, to escape the Jim Crow South, to find other possibilities for themselves and their

01:07:04.720 families. And so that meant that there was an influx of Black people into U.S. cities across

01:07:09.860 the Northeast and across the West. And so as there was an influx of Black Americans, people

01:07:16.540 who identified as white or identified with whiteness or for some reason had anti-Black

01:07:21.740 sentiment wanted to live away from the increasingly Black inner city, the increasingly Black urban

01:07:29.080 cores of the cities. And so they wanted suburbs, which promoted white flight. And in order to 0.95

01:07:34.680 live in the suburbs, but work in the city, because the city is where the economic opportunities are,

01:07:39.360 you need freeways, you need highways. And so this first wave, I call it the first wave of

01:07:43.920 gentrification, was really taking hold in the 1960s with the creation of freeways, sometimes 0.51

01:07:50.440 through neighborhoods to separate a white area from a black area, sometimes through cities so

01:07:56.180 that people can get out of the city to live in the suburbs. And so what this meant is that people 0.69

01:08:01.240 were unhappy about having freeways through their neighborhoods, about having all this traffic

01:08:06.000 noise and all of the pollution and completely cutting them off from other people and also

01:08:11.560 certain services, certain opportunities, dividing the space. And so they started revolting against

01:08:17.840 these freeways. They started revolting against the way that urban planning was happening in the

01:08:23.020 cities based on racism. And it also further reinforced the racialization of space and

01:08:29.280 residential segregation, which is why when you look at communities of color across the country

01:08:35.640 In many cases, if there is something that is polluting or toxic, it is in their neighborhood because you have such acute residential segregation that you're able to just put all of the undesirable stuff with the undesirable people.

01:08:50.820 And then there's a freeway through there. And so you forget about them because they're completely cut off.

01:08:55.300 I grew up in West Oakland, which is situated between three major highways and next to a port.

01:09:00.740 So it's a cloud of fog over West Oakland and all of us children in the neighborhood had asthma. And at the time, children in West Oakland had the highest rates of asthma in the Bay Area because of that urban design process, which contributed to the environmental pollution, which was a result of residential segregation.

01:09:19.360 And so these connections are apparent throughout our history of designing cities. And so the National Environmental Policy Act was a way to give communities a say in how these types of projects go about doing what they're doing or if they should even be allowed to go forward.

01:09:38.260 And so the reason why it needs to be gutted in the case of the Trump administration is so that people can continue to do these toxic, polluting, exclusive, dividing projects without having to hear from the community, without having to be accountable to the communities that they're impacting.

01:09:56.700 So it's extremely important in the legal sense to give people standing, right, which means giving people a reason to be in courts. It's important to give communities a reason to be in court to fight the projects that affect where they live and the quality of their life.

01:10:13.420 And so when you're trying to just do things for profit, you don't want to think of other

01:10:17.640 people because that gets in the way of doing what's most profitable, because usually what's

01:10:21.920 most profitable is at the expense of human safety, security, and livelihood.

01:10:26.320 So if humans can put their safety, security, and livelihood on the table when you're trying

01:10:30.940 to propose a project, it makes it more difficult for you.

01:10:33.300 So the National Environmental Policy Act helps support communities in fighting against things

01:10:39.020 that affect their livelihood and their environment.

01:10:40.780 And this history of civil disobedience and direct action prompted by the urban revitalization that was racialized, the racialization of space in cities is what created the need for this policy act.

01:10:55.700 And so it continues as the resistance continues, as people continue to fight for their communities and their neighborhoods and their space, that we need all the legal tools that we can get to fight them.

01:11:06.700 We need to fight them on the ground, in the courts, in the sky, everywhere. Wherever we can

01:11:10.900 fight them, we need more tools to do so. And the National Environmental Policy Act is one of those

01:11:15.740 tools. I'm so with you there that we need all the tools we can get and to lose NEPA right out from

01:11:23.500 underneath us with so many people not even knowing that it's under threat would be... Yeah, I just

01:11:29.200 can't imagine. Well, I can imagine, I guess that's what's so frightening about it. What could happen

01:11:34.720 if we lose public processes like NEPA, because I feel like it's kind of a domino effect.

01:11:40.080 The more access we lose to be in direct engagement with these larger resource extraction projects,

01:11:47.680 the less rules there will be, the more impact there will be in a negative way.

01:11:51.900 So thank you for speaking to that.

01:11:53.840 And Teju, this has been such a deep and complex conversation, and I'm left with the reminder

01:12:01.740 that the world is not condemned to a death sentence. And we have a lot of work to do,

01:12:07.420 but we have a lot of tools and amazing leadership to follow to do this work. And so I'd like to ask

01:12:15.720 if you have any personal incantations for our earth and our communities before we say goodbye.

01:12:22.200 Absolutely. I just want to say thank you, Ayanna, for your thoughtfulness and your patience and

01:12:27.580 your encouragement and your vocal resonance affirmations of some of the things that I'm

01:12:32.440 saying, because sometimes I just think I'm going in circles. So it's nice to be understood and

01:12:36.840 seen. And so I appreciate you for providing the space where I can talk about the way that my mind

01:12:42.460 works and how I translate that into the work that I do with organizations and collectives.

01:12:47.420 So again, I just want to thank you for creating that space for me and for being so gentle and

01:12:53.180 soft and also thoughtful and engaged and informed. With that, a current incantation, if you will,

01:13:00.640 a song that I've been listening to on a daily basis. There's so many things that I feel from

01:13:06.180 the sounds produced in the song. It's called Love is the Message, and it's by Yusef Deyes and

01:13:12.760 Alphamist, and it features Mansoor Brown and Rocco Palladino. It's this 12-minute amalgamation

01:13:20.100 an array of amazing sounds that Yousef Day as the drummer is making produced by Alphamist

01:13:26.040 with all of these little details and nuances and notes that just make you forget what you

01:13:33.340 were worried about, what you were stressed about, and just remind you that all of it

01:13:37.960 comes down to love, which is a physical vibration in our body, which we have to figure out how

01:13:42.520 to operationalize and functionalize through equity.

01:13:44.920 And so Yusef Day is Alphamist. Love is a message is the incantation that I am listening to every day to just like feel what it feels like to be a human in my body, to be connected to the environment, to be connected to nature, to be able to breathe air, even if it's sometimes not clean, to drink water and feel nourished, to have access to clean water.

01:14:04.020 so I would like to leave you with that song as an incantation and hopefully you could

01:14:09.560 listen to it and dance around to it and just enjoy all the sounds that they've created so

01:14:15.100 amazingly with their instrumentation. I can't wait to listen and thank you for being willing

01:14:20.900 to speak to us in these ways and I'm so grateful to create space for you to unwind your mind with

01:14:30.300 us because there's so much in there. And I've loved being on this mental journey with you for

01:14:36.360 the last hour or so. It's been eye-opening and it's been expansive. And yeah, I think that we

01:14:43.780 need to sit in these conversations a lot more with each other and just keep going at it day

01:14:49.480 by day because it's huge problems. But unless we're willing to really sit there and deconstruct

01:14:56.520 and reconstruct together, I don't think we're going to get to where we're trying to go.

01:15:00.800 So thank you, Teju, again.

01:15:10.620 Thanks for listening to another episode of For the Wild Podcast.

01:15:15.040 I'm audio producer Andrew Storrs.

01:15:17.760 The music you heard today was from Jason Marsalis,

01:15:21.540 Kermit Ruffins and Irvin Mayfield,

01:15:23.540 and the Rebirth Brass Band.

01:15:26.520 I'd like to thank our host and founder, Ayanna Young, along with the rest of our podcast team,

01:15:32.340 Carter Lou McElroy, Aidan McRae, Francesca Glassbell, Hannah Wilton, Erica Ekrem, Aaron Wise, and Melanie Younger.

01:15:56.520 You

For The Wild - April 29, 2020

TEJU ADISA-FARRAR on Remapping Our World ⧸177

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