(Highlights) ADA LIMÓN

(Highlights) ADA LIMÓN

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National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Poet & Host of The Slowdown podcast

This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.

ADA LIMÓN

ADA LIMÓN

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National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Poet & Host of The Slowdown podcast

This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.

(Highlights) SIRI HUSTVEDT

(Highlights) SIRI HUSTVEDT

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Novelist and Essayist

The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.

SIRI HUSTVEDT

SIRI HUSTVEDT

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Novelist and Essayist

The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.

(Highlights) MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY
MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY
(Highlights) OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

(Highlights) OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

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Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International

Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist

There’s a wide range of reasons that we really need to understand the root causes of a lot of our social ills and environmental ills. I think we need to continue to come back to this question of how we heal this imposed divide between the natural world and human social constructs. And that healing is key to how we’re going to really unwind the perilous moment that we face right now. How do we reconnect with the natural world? Not just intellectually, but in a very embodied way.

OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

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Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International

Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist

There’s a wide range of reasons that we really need to understand the root causes of a lot of our social ills and environmental ills. I think we need to continue to come back to this question of how we heal this imposed divide between the natural world and human social constructs. And that healing is key to how we’re going to really unwind the perilous moment that we face right now. How do we reconnect with the natural world? Not just intellectually, but in a very embodied way.

(Highlights) PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

(Highlights) PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

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Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian

It’s true. In Haiti, to a large degree more women were involved in the Revolution, in the war, in the fighting for the nation for the very simple reason that women had more opportunities. After a certain time, we became invisible. Once you’re in your 60’s, you are missing a few front teeth, in fact, some of the women used to take a stone and break up their front teeth so that they wouldn’t be noticed anymore. “That’s just an old lady with no front teeth. Okay, she goes about her business, nobody looks at her. She can do nothing.” And those were the fighters–the greatest fighters of our revolution.

PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

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Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian

It’s true. In Haiti, to a large degree more women were involved in the Revolution, in the war, in the fighting for the nation for the very simple reason that women had more opportunities. After a certain time, we became invisible. Once you’re in your 60’s, you are missing a few front teeth, in fact, some of the women used to take a stone and break up their front teeth so that they wouldn’t be noticed anymore. “That’s just an old lady with no front teeth. Okay, she goes about her business, nobody looks at her. She can do nothing.” And those were the fighters–the greatest fighters of our revolution.

(Highlights) DR. FARHANA SULTANA

(Highlights) DR. FARHANA SULTANA

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Dr. Farhana Sultana is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University, where she is also the Research Director for Environmental Collaboration and Conflicts at the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflicts and Collaboration (PARCC).

Dr. Sultana is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar of political ecology, water governance, post‐colonial development, social and environmental justice, climate change, and feminism. Her research and scholar-activism draw from her experiences of having lived and worked on three continents as well as from her backgrounds in the natural sciences, social sciences, and policy experience.

Prior to joining Syracuse, she taught at King’s College London and worked at United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Author of several dozen publications, her recent books are “The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles” (2012), “Eating, Drinking: Surviving” (2016) and “Water Politics: Governance, Justice, and the Right to Water” (2020). Dr. Sultana graduated Cum Laude from Princeton University (in Geosciences and Environmental Studies) and obtained her Masters and PhD (in Geography) from the University of Minnesota, where she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

She was awarded the Glenda Laws Award from the American Association of Geographers for “outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues” in 2019.

Dr. Farhana Sultana · Co-author: Water Politics: Governance, Justice & the Right to Water, Fmr. UNDP
Climate Change & Environmental Solutions · Creative Process Original Series

DR. FARHANA SULTANA

We are always students. We are students of the earth. We need to do better and we can do better because the capacity of the human spirit is quite expansive and we owe it to future generations to do the best we can do while we can…It’s about who is at the table or rather what is the table, meaning what are the terms of the debate. Setting the terms of the debate, but how do we even know what the terms of the debate are, who is being included, who is being heeded, and part of that is, therefore, a decolonizing of knowledge and power structures because it’s centrally or fundamentally a justice issue.

One of the issues is that, yes, it is harder to be a woman of color in any field, but it is harder to be a very outspoken vocal woman of color. That has been my reality because I don’t think silence is an option. Too many centuries of my people were silenced in various ways, and if I have the privilege of education and voice it is an absolute unending responsibility to therefore speak out and share my knowledge and expertise.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Mariana Monahan Negron with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Mariana Monahan Negron. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

(Highlights) MARGE PIERCY

(Highlights) MARGE PIERCY

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Novelist, Poet & Activist

People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…

DR. FARHANA SULTANA

DR. FARHANA SULTANA

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Co-author: Water Politics: Governance, Justice & the Right to Water
Fmr. UNDP Programme Officer, United Nations Development Programme

We are always students. We are students of the earth. We need to do better and we can do better because the capacity of the human spirit is quite expansive and we owe it to future generations to do the best we can do while we can…It’s about who is at the table or rather what is the table, meaning what are the terms of the debate. Setting the terms of the debate, but how do we even know what the terms of the debate are, who is being included, who is being heeded, and part of that is, therefore, a decolonizing of knowledge and power structures because it’s centrally or fundamentally a justice issue.

MARGE PIERCY

MARGE PIERCY

/

Novelist, Poet & Activist

People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…

(Highlights) ANA CASTILLO

(Highlights) ANA CASTILLO

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Award-winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist, Artist
Author of My Book of the Dead
One of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.

ANA CASTILLO

ANA CASTILLO

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Award-winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist, Artist
Author of My Book of the Dead
One of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.

(Highlights) SIRI HUSTVEDT

(Highlights) SIRI HUSTVEDT

/

Novelist and Essayist

The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.

SIRI HUSTVEDT

SIRI HUSTVEDT

/

Novelist and Essayist

The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.

(Highlights) ALICE NOTLEY

(Highlights) ALICE NOTLEY

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Poet

I wrote "I the People" in about 1985. I was living in New York and it was one of those years when it was an anniversary of the Constitution…My first husband had died a few years previously, and I didn't feel like I was part of any "we." But I did feel that I was "the people," somehow. So, I just changed it to "I the People." It seemed to me that that could be something that anyone might say to themselves, I the people.

ALICE NOTLEY

ALICE NOTLEY

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Poet

It's all-inclusive – poetry– and everything is poetry in a certain way, and poetic measure is like what we're composed of. It's what we are. I mean, we're poetry.