♪ And you don't seem to notice I'm not here ♪
♪ I'm just a mirror ♪
- The word eco comes from the Greek meaning home,
but how disconnected we are from our home.
You know, this is where we live.
♪ All alone ♪
♪ I had to go ♪
♪ Can't you hear me, I'm not comin' home ♪
- The climate anxiety that I feel is really strong.
I'm really curious to know because you guys are really going
and doing this all the time,
and spending your time doing it.
I wanna know, how are you guys just okay.
- [Tori] As I said before, community holds you
in your darkest days.
And being part of a movement where you are with people
who are experiencing exactly the same thing.
- People don't know how to help because they're hurting.
How can you help others and help the community
when you're hurting yourself,
when you can't even help yourself?
And it's all about healing.
Healing the earth heals ourselves.
Healing ourselves heals the earth.
[gentle music]
- People just so much of the time don't, can't see things
unless they specifically experienced them.
And so it's just hard when life seems perfect.
Well, how bad can it be?
- As someone that has gone into the capitol,
been in Congress, has done a lot of lobbying
on protecting our sacred lands from fossil fuel extraction
and everything that's going on with the climate crisis
in Alaska and in my homelands, knowing what was going on,
I couldn't just sit back and let that sit inside of me.
I had to be a part of this movement.
[gentle music]
- Yeah.
So I see myself as a scholar activist,
navigating academia and also navigating the activist realm,
and specifically trying to use my proximity
to these institutions of power,
like Oxford and the Rhodes program.
I have an organization non-profit called
Black Girl Environmentalist that is meant to celebrate
the unique contributions that Black women, Black girls,
and Black non-binary environmentalists have had
in the environmental space.
[gentle music]
- In my personal experience, at the age of nine
I started getting really sick from nosebleeds,
stomach pains, asthma.
And at the age of 19, I was diagnosed with cancer.
People Not Pozos is really a grassroots campaign
in my community of South Los Angeles.
And it's an intergenerational grassroots campaign.
It had youth and elders involved,
and it was us demanding that the city listened to us,
us demanding that we have the right to breathe clean air,
the right to open our windows in our own homes.
It's environmental racism where these wells are placed.
Black and Brown, Indigenous low-income people
are suffering these impacts at a greater rate than the rest.
[gentle ambient music] [birds chirping]
- I often think the word climate in and of itself
is a very whitewashed perception of what this is.
If it were to be accurately named to me, I would call it
the result of all systems of oppression crisis.
But that doesn't have a ring to it, does it?
Like no one's gonna use that. And climate is a very--
- I felt as though environmentalism sat in this high tower,
of privilege, whiteness, and wealth.
And I said, "That's not a movement for me.
And the issues that I feel like are so prevalent
to my life, racial justice, gender justice."
And it's been in actually seeing the environment
as an opportunity, and the environmental movement,
as an opportunity that is going to allow us
in solving the climate crisis
to essentially restructure our world.
[gentle ambient music] [birds chirping]
- We've always been here.
Our ancestors have always been here doing this work
before sustainability was even a word,
like the way that we know of it today.
And I'm born and raised in Georgia,
which is the heart of the civil rights movement.
And there's so much overlap between civil rights
and social justice activism and environmental activism.
[gentle ambient music] [birds chirping]
- And something that I really try to strive away from
is that not looking at these big technocratic solutions,
but actually looking within local solutions
that are actually rooted in evidence-based hope.
You know, forging going around Los Angeles and looking
for fresh foods and vegetables that are growing outside
or growing new microgreens in your apartment.
Like, these are radical acts to actually share
and showcase how food is actually used
as a tool to oppress us, or it can nourish us
and challenge us to be better.
- One hundred percent.
So we know all environmental issues are human rights issues.
So even when you look at sustainable fashion
and the impact that the fashion industry has
on our planet, on our climate,
you also look at the impact that it has on people.
So how it's mostly women of color that are
put in these dangerous work environments
and their no-rights are not being fought for
on a larger scale.
[indistinct chatter] [gentle ambient music]
- I remember learning about what the meat
and the dairy industry was doing to our planet.
And that's when I was like, "What?"
- To me, veganism kind of led me
to that compassionate lens rather than this absolute lens
of like, this is about perfectionism,
it's more about understanding.
- But at least for me, there's always this pressure
to be the perfect activist and fit this exact model
of what an activist should be.
And I love your work as bad activists.
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
We are a group of people who were
in the climate justice space who felt so perhaps held back
and also weighed down by the expectation of others,
to the point where it really hinders people
from taking action because it's like,
"If you're not good enough, then what's the point?"
- We don't know everything either.
We're doing our part, we know what our bodies
have been through, we know what our families
and our communities have lived.
But at the end of the day,
I don't know all of the legal terms,
I don't know all of the scientific facts.
But that's why we work as a team with the people who do.
- To be sharing each other's knowledge, experience.
- 'Cause together we know everything.
- For me as well, climate deniers and climate doomers
are on that safe wavelength.
Because what does that do for us?
What does that do to generate and inspire us, right?
To generate hope and inspire us to build a better future.
And I'm very curious as well about Indigenous wisdom.
You work very closely with your family.
What have you learned from them
about this concept of stubborn optimism?
- The realities are so different from people
who are learning about the climate crisis
in the global north versus people who are experiencing it
in the global south.
And the reason why it's stubborn and not just optimism
is because the stubbornness comes from the resilience.
The stubbornness comes from the "I'm not gonna give up."
Think about it, either people who have suffered
are the ones being optimistic.
- [Tori] You don't have the choice.
- You cannot have the choice to not also follow that.
♪ You don't seem to notice I'm not here ♪
♪ I'm just a mirror ♪
♪ You check your complexion to find ♪
- I just really wanna hear your experiences
of just feeling like the only body, only person that cares
at all.
- I mean, I think everyone has a very important part
to play when it comes to the climate crisis.
I think of it like we're all a symphony.
Whether you're playing a small instrument like the flute
or a big one like the bassoon,
you are instrumental, you're critical to this movement,
and you do hear it when an instrument falls out.
- Like at least for me, getting into the climate movement
of feeling alone and like that you're the only one
that recognizes this, and then with connecting
with people my age that are experiencing a similar thing,
that bond is really special.
♪ With my future ♪
♪ Can't wait to meet her ♪
[Billie vocalizing]
- And so the concept of radical imagination for me
is like super important for everyone to imagine
what things could look like.
- Ooh. Okay. - Right.
- This is that thing. - Right.
- This is that thing I've been trying to say
and I haven't been able to say it.
- Activism is a practice of imagination.
Because activism is about questioning what is wrong
in this space and how can we make it better?
- It is the goal of oppressive systems
to make us feel hopeless, to take away our joy,
to take away-- - To steal our imagination.
- Absolutely. To steal our imagination.
And imagination is such a powerful tool.
It's not something that's childish or irrelevant.
It is actually one of our greatest solutions
to imagining a more sustainable and equitable future.
[people clapping and cheering] [indistinct chattering]
♪ 'Cause I, I'm in love ♪
♪ With my future ♪
♪ Can't wait to meet her ♪
♪ And I, I'm in love ♪
♪ But not with anybody else ♪
[gentle ambient music] [birds chirping]