Climate California

(peaceful music) - [Charles] I love humans.

I love our ambition.

I love our imagination.

I love even... our drama.

We are capable of such brilliance, such speed and distance, ever higher, ever further, ever more, more, more.

Life has so much to offer and we pull it into the human embrace.

But our striving now clashes with surviving.

We have pushed our planet to its limits.

What will our shining achievements achieve when our home's on fire?

Earth's story is a song and we've cranked up its beats per minute, its BPM.

Now we all have to catch up.

So how do we both speed up and slow down in time?

How do we reset the BPM of our new world?

I'm Charles Loi.

I'm a filmmaker who began to see that the California we grew up in is disappearing.

Climate change demands new solutions and new stories.

My friends and I set out to find those narratives.

(energetic violins rising) (keyboard clicks) (peaceful music) - [Charles] Where to begin?

Sometimes, it helps to know your ending.

So our composer Miguel and I sat down to figure out our last song for this show.

(bouncy, evocative music) - You're feeling like kind of the inspiration, like walking away with the tools that you've kind of taken with you as you've gone through each episode.

- I think it's in the ballpark.

I think it's good, but I kind of want, like, more energy.

- Okay.

- Like I almost want somebody to rap over that.

(both laughing) - My brother was this morning.

That's what we have right here, a little bit.

(peaceful music, singing) Like we could do something more like that.

- That was great!

- Of course it's the thing that I like, "Put it away."

- No!

"It's not going to work for this."

I know Raine said she was excited to do BVs for this as well, so I'm, I'm curious to see what, what would happen if we combine her voice with Lawrence's?

- What do you think, Milo, you like this song?

- What do you think Mr.

DP?

- [Hannah] He kind of looks like a person from this angle.

(laughing) - He is a person.

Hope Something that you call for I don't know what to say but Something that is gone for, uh, uh - The idea for the song is like starting off a little slow.

It starts to pick up.

This first part, the verse being a little slower, it's supposed to be something that you're thinking about.

- I don't know about you, but it's hard not to feel despair these days.

There's supporting evidence for it everywhere you look.

So we talked to someone who found herself stuck in climate nihilism and found her way out of it.

In "Saving Time," Jenny Odell decided to reimagine time itself.

I loved your metaphor of the shipping containers.

- We know that the things that are in shipping containers are quite different, but the shipping container itself is meant to standardize those things in the name of a certain type of exchange.

Similarly, that's the language that we have now for time.

I would think of fungible time as being like the time that you enter into a worksheet or a time sheet, that it seems uniform.

It can be broken up into pieces without really changing its essence.

As opposed to ecological time or bodily time where there are stages and the stages are different.

There is no such thing as a minute, and there's no such thing as an hour.

Moments are not interchangeable.

Any measurement system betrays some overall value system.

- [Charles] "Saving Time" explores how this productive approach to time has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, including education.

- Grading was very utilitarian.

The history of that measurement is very much tied to extracting resources and extracting labor.

- That feeling of constantly not measuring up?

Of falling short?

It's partly rooted in industrialization.

In the 19th century, factory owners started using a practice called scientific management, which aimed to engineer more productive workers.

The idea spread.

Schoolteachers started using an A through F grading system, which conveniently helped employers sort future employees into good workers and not so good workers.

The ideal student or worker might be called the achievement subject.

Someone who's internalized the system's goals so much that they drive themselves.

You mentioned the achievement subject.

I felt really attacked when you mentioned this.

(laughs) - Many people do.

(laughing) - I love how you mentioned you gave yourself a report card.

- So that report card was not long after I had learned to write.

There are a lot of mistakes in it.

It was asking my parents to grade me on various aspects of being a person or a child and- - They graded you really nicely.

- They did.

They were very merciful in their grading.

- It was like outstanding on every, every level.

- Yeah, I thought back to that while I was writing the book because I was realizing how deep the sort of language of externally recognizable achievement and progress was in me already.

Kind of like being your own worst boss.

- What would you do now instead of that?

- Instead of the report?

Yeah.

I would say that encounter is a lot more important to me than achievement.

Like encounters that change you or that you're moved by.

Like that's kind of how I, you know, "measure" my days or my life.

Maybe it wouldn't be a report card, maybe it would just be a letter.

- Hm.

That's much more self-compassionate.

- Yeah.

- In her book, Jenny mentions the term infraordinary.

The infraordinary is the layer just beneath the ordinary, the miracle hidden in the mundane.

Look, we often need spectacular beauty to remember the wonder of the world.

Some miracles are obvious and worth every mile.

But everyday miracles?

Seeing those requires a bit more patience.

- I developed this notion that I just started calling unfreezing something in time, which is to choose a space and you visit it enough that its changes and its life become perceptible to you.

Everything that's alive exists and registers time and is responding and it can often respond in really surprising ways.

- For me, one thing I took away from the book was a sense that uncertainty and doubt are necessary to get a sense of agency.

- When you think about climate nihilism, time is closed, it's linear and we know what's going to happen and I was trying to bring back the sense of the moment.

Like the moment in which anything can happen.

I almost think of these systems like, for example, "time is money" as a lens with a grid on it.

I spent a lot of time waiting for it to wear off.

- So what lies beyond the grid?

To help us remove that lens, we want to learn from Buddhist monks Jin Chuan Shi and Jin Wei Shi.

- We often get burned out because we want something to happen in a certain way.

And it doesn't happen in the way we want it.

You can actually experience what your experience is without going to the next step of craving or pushing away or becoming numb.

You can actually just be fully there present.

That's where compassion is born.

The ability to hold the pain, be attuned to the pain, and suffering that the Earth is going through, observe it, care for it, and then from within the pain itself some process of healing arises.

I grew up in this area nearby in Saratoga.

We're a very secular family.

I'll say the main religion was, you know, material success, get good grades, get a good college, get a job, get married, Silicon Valley success.

People were very successful but oftentimes quite miserable.

Gunn High had all these students walking across the train tracks.

And I thought to myself is this really what I want to do?

I remember going home and telling my mom, you know, like, "Mom, I figured out my life path.

I want to be a monk."

Well, I tell you a Silicon Valley mom, that's not her dream for her kid.

- Yeah, it's not a lot of money in it.

- Yeah, not a lot of money.

It's like no money in it.

You could end up in some kind of cult or something.

Y'know?

10 years later she says like, that's like the best gift she ever got in her life was me becoming a monk.

It allowed her to connect to something deeper in herself that she actually had to let go of when she was a kid.

- Yeah.

- She even told me, you know when I grew up I wanted to do these things, but my father said, "You should be an accountant.

Because that will be more financially stable."

- That'll protect you.

- That'll protect you.

- The whole capitalism is founded by lacking.

- I'm not enough.

That's why I need something outside to fill this hole in myself.

Old age, sickness, and death comes from birth.

Birth comes from "becoming".

- We're often saying, how we can capture this moment of becoming.

When you click in Amazon, "buy it" moment.

- Oh, now it's mine.

- Ooh, now it's mine.

Oh, I exist.

Let's look at the next one.

You know?

Becoming actually happens second by second, moment by moment.

If we start to connect with another story returning to our fullness, what is our potential?

- Freeing ourselves of desire and fear is helpful, but even if all of us found inner peace, I wonder if that would be enough.

Jin Chuan Shi and Jin Wei Shi have a friend who's asking the same question.

Thanissara is the author of "Time to Stand Up", a call to action for Buddhists.

She argues for moving beyond personal enlightenment journeys to confronting systemic issues.

Patriarchy.

Economic inequality.

Climate change.

Thanissara and others are reimagining modern Buddhism starting from the inside by reforming its institutions and spreading outward to society.

Less detachment, more engagement.

But how do you balance a sense of peace with a sense of urgency?

- This is something Buddhism is learning.

Given the current conditions of the world.

Too many Buddhists are just meditating.

We need to actually take compassion out into the world.

- We ask a question, what grows here?

We are in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Settlers avoid the landslides, want quick solution, quick answer, introduce Scotch Brooms, increasing risk of fire tremendously.

- Moving with speed without clarity creates more problems.

'Cause usually we're thinking it shouldn't be this way.

The world shouldn't be like this.

And creating more division between what's going on in the world and what's going on in my own heart.

Listen to the whole field.

What grows here?

- What is the right song to play with life, with ourselves and surroundings?

- [Charles] To find that song, we jammed with musician Raine Stern.

- When we talked last, you were talking about feeling like you're singing to a loved one.

And so I have a bunch of ideas speaking to the earth as you, so it's like super direct.

Singing something like, You are my home wherever I go, You are, you are, you are.

Painting a picture of sitting with somebody and... reminiscing.

That's kind of what I was thinking from the beginning.

- I like that.

I really, really like the whole "You are" thing.

That I think helps elevate everything.

- Can we call you right back?

-Oh?

(laughs) - Awesome.

- I forgot about the timer.

- Recording in progress.

- And this is why people should donate to public media.

So we can afford Zoom Pro.

(laughs) Singers and artists have never just been entertainers.

- Everyone has started to feel like they need to be more of a brand or more of an ad than a human being.

So I'm on the autism spectrum and I'm also a part of the LGBTQ community.

Because I was so different, I felt almost more of a kindredness to nature than I did sometimes to other people.

And so when I picked up the guitar, people would, you know, walk into a space that I was in and playing and they would do a, y'know... Oh!

And now I've got their attention and I realize now I can actually say something.

As an artist like it's my duty to use my platform to talk about the most insane thing that's ever happened in human history.

Individualism is killing us.

Togetherness is required.

The only way to really feel like that's happening is when we are physically together and when we are physically in nature and we need to find a way to prioritize that in our culture.

But our culture has been centered around our monetary system.

And this screen time, it's robbing us of our connection to each other.

I think people really need to take some time away.

Go to a quiet space where you can actually hear your soul.

And then be super intentional about curating friends, lovers, partners, community, people that you do business with that support you.

If we bring our flawed selves together, then we can grow something.

- [Charles] But how do you get people to listen?

Sometimes you just need to throw stuff at the wall.

You've probably heard of the climate activists who threw tomato soup on a Van Gogh painting.

But journalists Alessandra Ram and Samantha Oltman suspected there was more to the story and created the podcast Sabotage, and they had a little help from a climate media company called Yellow Dot Studios, founded by Adam McKay.

You may have heard of his movies.

- Hey Staci.

- How are you?

- Hi, how's it going?

- We've never actually talked-- - Yeah.

- about feedback that you at Yellow Dot have gotten-- - Yeah, yeah.

-about the series.

We've gotten some really good feedback from people.

A lot of people thought they knew the story, thought that it was like, okay, these dumb kids who are just like trying to make a big stink about something and then realizing like, oh no, there was a thought-out plan.

And there are people involved that you can relate to in a way that maybe you didn't think you could.

Which I think is a really great testament to you guys of just peeling back the onion.

- They rehearsed it by throwing it in the shower.

- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

- Okay, honestly?

I found the stunt infuriating at first.

And I wasn't alone.

But as Alessandra and Samantha found out, ticking everybody off was kind of the point.

And as for the painting, it was fine, protected by a sheet of glass.

The stunt was an attention grab, not vandalism.

But like a good soup, the plot thickens.

We talked to Alessandra, Samantha, and Yellow Dot's head of digital, Elijah Zarlin, to get the scoop.

- In researching Just Stop Oil and disruptive climate activism, in most news stories about what was happening, there'd be like a throwaway line, like, one of their main funders is Eileen Getty, the granddaughter of the biggest oil tycoon in US history, once the wealthiest man in the world.

It felt like a juicy story you'd maybe talk about with a friend.

- Provoking strong feelings is what gets attention.

That's why the stunts are so effective in this attention economy where you need to capture someone's attention in three seconds.

- A lot of the climate story is pollution numbers and how much time and carbon budgets.

And that's part of the Big Oil disinformation strategy, too, is making it all feel as impersonal as possible.

- Telling this story made me feel hopeful 'cause there were these very ordinary people, some of whom are shy, they're not rebels, they don't like to be in the spotlight, taking risks, standing up for something that they believed in and actually made tangible progress on the issue they care about.

- Turns out Elijah was a lot like the people Samantha and Alessandra profiled.

In another life, he worked on Obama's presidential campaign, but the hope and change he'd fought for wasn't coming fast enough.

- Campaign was 2008, three years later I went from trying to elect the president to standing out front of the White House and getting arrested, protesting the Keystone XL pipeline.

10 years later, you have people saying, "What else can we try?"

- [Charles] So this is what Yellow Dot's trying.

Leaning in to the absurdity.

- Uh, your social media.

It's so depressing.

What you're saying to me makes me wanna fight you a little.

- The weird motivation for me is that the rest of the world is, is either pretending this doesn't exist or doesn't know about it, and I'm not going to be taken by surprise.

My life is going to go closer to how I think it will than most people's will.

- The real question is, who's the real crazy person here?

- Right.

- It's not exactly people's fault.

We certainly have instinctual tendencies that make us not want to think about these things, but those have been played to by Big Oil and actively exploited by people with tons of money.

- There's a large category of people who think climate change is going to run its course and it'll be really bad and like we're screwed anyway.

I mean they use a different word, we're -- anyway.

- The biggest message in a lot of ways that we can get out is that actually we have a choice.

At every point, you always have a choice.

- Following the rules, being well-behaved, that's not going to work anymore.

The activists told us, I was waiting for the people in charge to do something.

And then I realized, they aren't.

It's up to me.

- And there's nobody at the wheel.

(all laughing) - I'm always trying to come back to this awareness of the fact that I'm not alone.

A Spanish journalist told me that there was a saying, "Do you need a therapist or do you need a union?"

- I love that.

There's some things where you can't just solve it on an individual level, you need to solve it on a systemic level.

- You know, for me, collective action IS self-help.

Talk to anyone who's been involved in any kind of collective action.

They are drawing individual sustenance from that.

- In her book, Thanissara writes about the importance of softness when we engage with the world, it made me think of these giants, rooted together, tall and strong, yet soft enough to sway with the wind.

Funny, I never noticed.

May we all stand strong no matter the winds.

- [Elijah] Things are impossible until they're not.

Once they reach that critical tipping point, changes can happen really fast.

- I think a lot of people marry their self-worth to their beliefs and so if their beliefs have to change or they have to let them go, then they feel like they have to like lose a piece of their self-worth.

But like that's just a lie.

Like, everything's always changing.

We're always learning, we're always growing, and your self-worth is inherent.

And so is the worth of our planet.

- And so if everyone listens to each other, has a sense of attunement, then we begin to flow as a whole field.

Every action we take ripples out into the universe.

(elk squealing) - It's been a long journey.

And we've witnessed so many ripples.

We need to stop burning fossil fuels.

Obviously.

As we do that, we need to protect frontline communities and help fossil fuel workers transition.

We need to become citizen scientists.

And support scientist scientists.

We need to harmonize with the planet, with our food, with our energy, and with our infrastructure.

We need to protect wild places.

For their own sake.

And for ours.

We need to store up in times of plenty and prepare for times of crisis by making small changes now.

We need to be more inclusive, without giving up our beliefs.

And we need to demand change in our ideas of what's possible, in our institutions, and in ourselves.

That's a lot.

And that's not even everything.

But if we align our ripples, starting from within and moving outward at the right tempo, they can merge into something bigger.

Part of a wave.

Part of... a story.

So this is the last episode... and I procrastinated.

We ran out of time.

And we worried that we didn't have the proper ending for you, nothing to wrap it up cleanly and perfectly.

But then we realized, why not leave it up to you?

Because the real finale isn't here.

It's out there.

It's you.

(song: You Are Home) When I was empty, you would stay full I would dream then that we'd grown old When I went silent, you still sang They take away, take away Forget you're everything Ain't no other feeling Something to believe in I can feel the Earth pushes with me Grab hold of the feeling Something we been needin' I can be the change, let it reel in I'm calling, hope you hear me I just want to breathe in all of your wonder I think it's time we realize It's more than just you and I - In screenwriting, there's something called the inciting incident.

The moment that sparks the chain reaction, and the characters can't go back.

They have to begin their journey.

Climate change is a story we write together, and every moment could be that spark.

If you pause long enough, step out of a modern mechanical time and into something older, more alive.

When you unfreeze time, unfreeze agency.

Life is a chain reaction of nows and each now is possibility.

Until collectively, a million possibilities become reality.

Cracks in the ground Tears in the sky Better together And I Know that you're worth it Your flaws are perfect It's not too late to try I'm burning with the summer sun Remembering my winter love My story's built upon you And I choose the truth - [Charles] We hope this show was enough incident to incite YOU, to inspire you, to find your role in this story.

Because we need you.

Your curiosity.

Your courage.

Because now, now, now!

Is when we reimagine... Everything.

I know I'm not alone Yes, you are my home With you And the stars You are, you are Home (uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (birds calling) My home Oh, oh, oh Oh, oh, oh Oh, oh, oh