Highlights - ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Athlete, Actor, American, Activist - Conversation with Editor DIAN HANSON

Highlights - ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Athlete, Actor, American, Activist - Conversation with Editor DIAN HANSON

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ATHLETE · ACTOR · AMERICAN · ACTIVIST
DIAN HANSON discusses photographic homage to ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.
– ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

It's not just that he grew up in a rural environment too. He was born on July 30th, 1947. And most of us today don't have any understanding or relationship to what Europe was like right after World War II. The winter of 1946/1947 in Austria was the most brutal in decades. The people already had too little food. They were in an occupied country. The summer potato crops failed. As Arnold has said, his mother had to go from farm to farm to farm, begging for food to be able to feed her children. His father, like all the men in the village, was defeated by the war. And he saw them all physically, emotionally, intellectually defeated and taking it out on their wives and children, that he was beaten and his mother was beaten. All the neighbor kids were beaten, and they were beaten into a kind of placid defeat. And he alone would not accept that. He could not see that life for himself. And so he wanted out of that. And as a poor boy, he had nothing but his body to work with. That was it. There was not going to be any college. There was not going to be any of that. There was going to be some kind of menial job, or he could use what he had - his body - to get him out of there.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Athlete, Actor, American, Activist - Conversation with Editor DIAN HANSON

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Athlete, Actor, American, Activist - Conversation with Editor DIAN HANSON

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ATHLETE · ACTOR · AMERICAN · ACTIVIST
DIAN HANSON discusses photographic homage to ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.
– ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

It's not just that he grew up in a rural environment too. He was born on July 30th, 1947. And most of us today don't have any understanding or relationship to what Europe was like right after World War II. The winter of 1946/1947 in Austria was the most brutal in decades. The people already had too little food. They were in an occupied country. The summer potato crops failed. As Arnold has said, his mother had to go from farm to farm to farm, begging for food to be able to feed her children. His father, like all the men in the village, was defeated by the war. And he saw them all physically, emotionally, intellectually defeated and taking it out on their wives and children, that he was beaten and his mother was beaten. All the neighbor kids were beaten, and they were beaten into a kind of placid defeat. And he alone would not accept that. He could not see that life for himself. And so he wanted out of that. And as a poor boy, he had nothing but his body to work with. That was it. There was not going to be any college. There was not going to be any of that. There was going to be some kind of menial job, or he could use what he had - his body - to get him out of there.

Highlights - DAVID FENTON - Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator

Highlights - DAVID FENTON - Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator

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Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator
Founder of Fenton Communications: The Social Change Agency
JStreet · Climate Nexus · The Death Penalty Information Center

It sounds like a cliche, but it really is true that history moves in pendulums and waves. And whatever is happening today is not going to last. It will change. So you have periods of concentrations of wealth and power, and then you have periods of rebellion. And I'm quite sure we're headed for another period of rebellion. You can see it a little bit now in the labor strife in the United States and the strikes. You can certainly see it in the massive demonstrations in France and Israel. Excessive concentrations of power breeds rebellion, and that's just inevitable. And the climate crisis is going to cause a lot of rebellion as people figure this out. And I think it's coming very soon, actually, because as you've noticed, the weather is getting very bad. It's become a non-linear accelerating phenomenon. And people will wake up to that. I just hope they wake up in time.

DAVID FENTON - Founder of Fenton Communications, Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator

DAVID FENTON - Founder of Fenton Communications, Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator

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Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator
Founder of Fenton Communications: The Social Change Agency
JStreet · Climate Nexus · The Death Penalty Information Center

It sounds like a cliche, but it really is true that history moves in pendulums and waves. And whatever is happening today is not going to last. It will change. So you have periods of concentrations of wealth and power, and then you have periods of rebellion. And I'm quite sure we're headed for another period of rebellion. You can see it a little bit now in the labor strife in the United States and the strikes. You can certainly see it in the massive demonstrations in France and Israel. Excessive concentrations of power breeds rebellion, and that's just inevitable. And the climate crisis is going to cause a lot of rebellion as people figure this out. And I think it's coming very soon, actually, because as you've noticed, the weather is getting very bad. It's become a non-linear accelerating phenomenon. And people will wake up to that. I just hope they wake up in time.

SIMON DALBY - Author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World

SIMON DALBY - Author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World

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Author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World
Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University

We also need to note most people move locally rather than globally. In the discussions about climate refugees, people are going to be dislocated. There are obviously going to be places that are going to become quite literally uninhabitable because they're too hot and too dry, or they've been flooded so frequently that they're just not sustainable. That said it is also worth pointing out that this climate change process is playing out in a global economy, which is also changing where people live and how people live very rapidly. the migration from rural areas to urban systems has been massive over the last couple of generations. We became an urban species.

Speaking Out of Place: JENNIFER JACQUET discusses The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

Speaking Out of Place: JENNIFER JACQUET discusses The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

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Author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

They weren't able to employ scientists to not find a fingerprint of anthropogenic climate change. They weren't able to pull that off, and when they're not able to do that, what they do instead is create an arsenal of expertise who just create the illusion of disagreement, and they were so successful at doing that with climate change that it's remarkable because there actually was scientific consensus. There wasn't this giant rift in the scientific community, and for decades, they created an illusion of disagreement that we all bought. And they're able to do that using Stanford University, Rockefeller University, these names of institutions as well as individuals, but they're not actually publishing science. And so I think it deserves a kind of special carve out of all of the tactics because it really says: actually these systems are working pretty well. You're just not getting the right information. And they do that again through the media and PR firms and controlling the dialogues and press releases and journals, and especially their relationship with the media, is very, very privileged.

Highlights - JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet - Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

Highlights - JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet - Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

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Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet · Director of Creative Writing Program · Emory University
Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

As writers, it's our job to write what will become clichés. Not to write clichés, but to be original enough that we make something that people are still saying for hundreds of years to come. And if that's what you're doing, that's pretty powerful. When I'm writing a poem I'm making a world. And if I can stick to that, then I have to believe that once a poem is out in the world, another world has been made, another way of living, another way of thinking, another way of seeing things.

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet - Editor of “How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill”

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet - Editor of “How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill”

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Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet · Director of Creative Writing Program · Emory University
Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

As writers, it's our job to write what will become clichés. Not to write clichés, but to be original enough that we make something that people are still saying for hundreds of years to come. And if that's what you're doing, that's pretty powerful. When I'm writing a poem I'm making a world. And if I can stick to that, then I have to believe that once a poem is out in the world, another world has been made, another way of living, another way of thinking, another way of seeing things.

Highlights - ERICA BERRY - Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

Highlights - ERICA BERRY - Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

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Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

And I think the ways that wolves converse with one another, there's also so much there that really conjures the way that we humans do. And I was trying to piece together: why did we feel so threatened by wolves? In part, I think because there's a sort of uncanny mirror that humans have seen in a wolf. And I'll give an example. Wolf packs will form a diversity of family structures very often. So they will have a nuclear family where you'll have two breeders, but they can also have an extended family where there's sort of aunts and uncles in the pack. Or (these are the biologist's names) they'll call it a step-family if a wolf pack welcomes an outside breeder. A foster family, if they welcome another outsider. And I think the way that a pack is its own ecosystem: if one wolf dies, there's one wolf in this pack that might be the one that teaches how to move through the territory. And if that one wolf dies, the whole pack has a much higher likelihood of disbanding. And so this idea that the interconnectivity between the packs and the individuality of the wolves is so critical. It is so beautiful, and you see that studying these different wolves, they have personalities.

ERICA BERRY - Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

ERICA BERRY - Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

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Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

And I think the ways that wolves converse with one another, there's also so much there that really conjures the way that we humans do. And I was trying to piece together: why did we feel so threatened by wolves? In part, I think because there's a sort of uncanny mirror that humans have seen in a wolf. And I'll give an example. Wolf packs will form a diversity of family structures very often. So they will have a nuclear family where you'll have two breeders, but they can also have an extended family where there's sort of aunts and uncles in the pack. Or (these are the biologist's names) they'll call it a step-family if a wolf pack welcomes an outside breeder. A foster family, if they welcome another outsider. And I think the way that a pack is its own ecosystem: if one wolf dies, there's one wolf in this pack that might be the one that teaches how to move through the territory. And if that one wolf dies, the whole pack has a much higher likelihood of disbanding. And so this idea that the interconnectivity between the packs and the individuality of the wolves is so critical. It is so beautiful, and you see that studying these different wolves, they have personalities.

Highlights - TOM LIN - Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022

Highlights - TOM LIN - Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022

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Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022

When I was growing up, it was all about representation. I think that was the thing that was being championed: we need more people of color in books, movies, across all media. And then I think what we saw was an extremely cynical and capitalistic-minded ruthless optimization of that, where someone said: Oh, you want representation? Then we'll just throw in token people of color into projects. And then we'll check that box. And I think that became so prevalent in so many pieces of media that that became what we thought of as representation. I think it's a salvageable concept because, I mean, when I encountered books growing up, they were all with white people in them. Front to back, start to finish. It was just white characters. And so when I started writing stories of my own in school as a middle schooler they - surprise - they had white people in them, right? There were just white people talking about other white people. I went to public school in Queens. I knew very few white people. And so I think what representation does at its best is that it informs the boundaries of possibility. By seeing yourself represented in media, you become able to imagine your own stories transpiring in media and being made available for everybody else to witness.

And so I think the point of representation is not just if we do a checklist of this piece of media, can we find a person of color. But I think the idea of representation is more that we want to be expanding the realm of storytelling, expanding what's possible by telling these stories that are not normally told.

TOM LIN - Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022

TOM LIN - Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022

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Author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2022

When I was growing up, it was all about representation. I think that was the thing that was being championed: we need more people of color in books, movies, across all media. And then I think what we saw was an extremely cynical and capitalistic-minded ruthless optimization of that, where someone said: Oh, you want representation? Then we'll just throw in token people of color into projects. And then we'll check that box. And I think that became so prevalent in so many pieces of media that that became what we thought of as representation. I think it's a salvageable concept because, I mean, when I encountered books growing up, they were all with white people in them. Front to back, start to finish. It was just white characters. And so when I started writing stories of my own in school as a middle schooler they - surprise - they had white people in them, right? There were just white people talking about other white people. I went to public school in Queens. I knew very few white people. And so I think what representation does at its best is that it informs the boundaries of possibility. By seeing yourself represented in media, you become able to imagine your own stories transpiring in media and being made available for everybody else to witness.

And so I think the point of representation is not just if we do a checklist of this piece of media, can we find a person of color. But I think the idea of representation is more that we want to be expanding the realm of storytelling, expanding what's possible by telling these stories that are not normally told.

Highlights - MARK MASLIN - Author of How To Save Our Planet: The Facts - Professor, Earth System Science, UCLondon

Highlights - MARK MASLIN - Author of How To Save Our Planet: The Facts - Professor, Earth System Science, UCLondon

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Author of How To Save Our Planet: The Facts
Professor of Earth System Science at University College London

I think the most important thing is realizing how much impact humans have had on the planet. For example, did you know that we move more rock and sediment than all the natural processes put together? We also have created enough concrete already to cover the whole world in a layer that's two millimeters thick, and that includes the oceans. We have also created and make something like 300 million tons of plastic every single year, which we know ends up in our rivers. It ends up in our oceans. And we've also found that microplastics have been found in human blood. So this is the impact we're having all around the world. We've also cut down 3 trillion trees, that's half the trees on the planet. We have doubled carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We've increased methane by about 150%, which has led to a warming of the planet of about 1.2 degrees Celsius. And If you weigh the land mammals, 30% of that weight is us humans. There are 8 billion of us, and I have to say a few of us could lose a few pounds, but 67% of that weight is our livestock. And just 3% is those wild animals. So in less than 5,000 years, we've gone from 99% being wild animals to less than 3%. That's how much impact we humans have had on the planet.

MARK MASLIN - Author of How To Save Our Planet: The Facts - Professor, Earth System Science, University College London

MARK MASLIN - Author of How To Save Our Planet: The Facts - Professor, Earth System Science, University College London

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Author of How To Save Our Planet: The Facts
Professor of Earth System Science at University College London

I think the most important thing is realizing how much impact humans have had on the planet. For example, did you know that we move more rock and sediment than all the natural processes put together? We also have created enough concrete already to cover the whole world in a layer that's two millimeters thick, and that includes the oceans. We have also created and make something like 300 million tons of plastic every single year, which we know ends up in our rivers. It ends up in our oceans. And we've also found that microplastics have been found in human blood. So this is the impact we're having all around the world. We've also cut down 3 trillion trees, that's half the trees on the planet. We have doubled carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We've increased methane by about 150%, which has led to a warming of the planet of about 1.2 degrees Celsius. And If you weigh the land mammals, 30% of that weight is us humans. There are 8 billion of us, and I have to say a few of us could lose a few pounds, but 67% of that weight is our livestock. And just 3% is those wild animals. So in less than 5,000 years, we've gone from 99% being wild animals to less than 3%. That's how much impact we humans have had on the planet.

Speaking Out of Place: CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN discusses “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea”

Speaking Out of Place: CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN discusses “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea”

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Author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea
Professor of English at University of Hawai'i · Coeditor of the journal Biography

I posit narrated humanity as a lens through which to study how narratives participate in struggles to conceive human being beyond juridical and narrative humanity. What I was thinking about was just the kind of narrative codes and conventions and genres that help us to understand who counts as human in ways that people who are fighting for human rights as a thing that you have to do, even as there are all kinds of critiques that can and have been made rightly so of human rights, but that you have to do it.

Highlights - Erland Cooper - Scottish Composer, Producer, Multi-instrumentalist

Highlights - Erland Cooper - Scottish Composer, Producer, Multi-instrumentalist

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Nature’s Songwriter
Producer · Multi-instrumentalist · Composer of Folded Landscapes

Music has the ability to transport you to a place and create a sort of internal landscape. And we all have life-changing things that happened to us. And I remember I made it as a way to kind of ease a busy mind. And perhaps I was missing home. I still call Orkney home, even though I'm not there every day. I'm a thousand miles away today, and I still call Orkney home. For example, when I hear the voice of the curlew, it transports me back to Orkney with such a jolt. In a heartbeat. And music can do that too. It's very transformative. Visual arts have the ability to do that too. And you could stare at a Rothko painting and cry and not quite know why. It can take days to figure out perhaps certain meanings from it. But music I think is quite instant. It can really do that.

Erland Cooper - Nature’s Songwriter - Composer of “Folded Landscapes”

Erland Cooper - Nature’s Songwriter - Composer of “Folded Landscapes”

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Nature’s Songwriter
Producer · Multi-instrumentalist · Composer of Folded Landscapes

Music has the ability to transport you to a place and create a sort of internal landscape. And we all have life-changing things that happened to us. And I remember I made it as a way to kind of ease a busy mind. And perhaps I was missing home. I still call Orkney home, even though I'm not there every day. I'm a thousand miles away today, and I still call Orkney home. For example, when I hear the voice of the curlew, it transports me back to Orkney with such a jolt. In a heartbeat. And music can do that too. It's very transformative. Visual arts have the ability to do that too. And you could stare at a Rothko painting and cry and not quite know why. It can take days to figure out perhaps certain meanings from it. But music I think is quite instant. It can really do that.

Highlights - SERGEI GURIEV - Political Economist - Provost of SciencesPo - Co-author of Spin Dictators

Highlights - SERGEI GURIEV - Political Economist - Provost of SciencesPo - Co-author of Spin Dictators

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Political Economist · Provost of SciencesPo
Co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century

In Russia, I ran a university, a new economic school. And as an economist and a public intellectual, I was engaged in interactions with the government, including with Vladimir Putin. And there, of course, the situation was that Russia was already a nondemocratic country, meaning that it was a country where elections were not free and fair and partial censorship was already in place. Yet in those years, we could express ourselves openly, not on national TV, but at least in newspapers and on radio. And that eventually brought me into trouble with Vladimir Putin, who at some point suggested that I talked too much and I should not be in the same country. I was also interrogated. My office was searched. And at some point, common friends told me, 'Look, you shouldn't be here.' And I bought a one-way ticket for the next day and just left Russia. The dictators in the 20th century used military or paramilitary uniforms to project brute force and fear. Today, the situation is different. Successful dictators pretend to be democrats.

SERGEI GURIEV - Economist - Provost of SciencesPo - Co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century

SERGEI GURIEV - Economist - Provost of SciencesPo - Co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century

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Political Economist · Provost of SciencesPo
Co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century

In Russia, I ran a university, a new economic school. And as an economist and a public intellectual, I was engaged in interactions with the government, including with Vladimir Putin. And there, of course, the situation was that Russia was already a nondemocratic country, meaning that it was a country where elections were not free and fair and partial censorship was already in place. Yet in those years, we could express ourselves openly, not on national TV, but at least in newspapers and on radio. And that eventually brought me into trouble with Vladimir Putin, who at some point suggested that I talked too much and I should not be in the same country. I was also interrogated. My office was searched. And at some point, common friends told me, 'Look, you shouldn't be here.' And I bought a one-way ticket for the next day and just left Russia. The dictators in the 20th century used military or paramilitary uniforms to project brute force and fear. Today, the situation is different. Successful dictators pretend to be democrats.

Highlights - JASON deCAIRES TAYLOR - Sculptor, Environmentalist, Creator of Underwater Museums

Highlights - JASON deCAIRES TAYLOR - Sculptor, Environmentalist, Creator of Underwater Museums

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Sculptor · Environmentalist · Creator of Underwater Museums

The sculptures get claimed and almost owned by the sea. And the textures that form the patterns, all things that could never be reproduced by human hands. And it's entirely unpredictable in many cases. I go to some of the "museums" expect to see this type of colonization or this type of growth, and it's nothing like how I've seen it envisaged it. It's completely different. Other times something has been made at its home, and there's an octopus that's built a house around it, or there's a school of fish that have nestled within the formations. There have been many, many different surprises along the way. I first started in the West Indies on an island called Grenada, which has a tropical reef system. And I expected the works to be sort of colonized. And I knew hard corals took a very long time to get established, to build their calcium skeletons, but actually, they were colonized within days. We saw white little calcareous worms, pink coraline algae, and green algae literally appeared sort of overnight.