Stories from the Stage

SARA KARP: I turn and say something along the lines of "Guys, we just talked to a congresswoman "about climate education.

We are so cool!"

EBEN BEIN: One of my students holds up her homemade picture frame, puts it around her face, and leads my students in their chant: "We are the future, framing the future."

DYAN deNAPOLI: I had no idea how we were even supposed to do this.

This was the largest animal rescue ever attempted, and the pressure was tremendous.

BEIN: My name is Eben Bein.

He or they pronouns are great.

I grew up on Nipmuck land, also known as Acton, Massachusetts, currently living on Pawtucket land, also known as Cambridge.

And I am an educator, first a high school teacher and now currently working for a nonprofit where I empower young people to build climate justice coalitions and talk to their legislators about climate justice policy.

Have you ever told a story on stage before?

No.

I've been on stage before.

I've done presentations.

I was a high school teacher, so I was in front of a classroom a lot.

But I have never told a story, and I'm surprised at how nervous I am.

(both laugh) HAZARD: Well, you know, we're very sure that you're going to be fantastic.

I can't wait to hear your story.

I'm wondering, how do you feel that storytelling can bring your work to life, your professional work?

So much of climate justice gets buried in numbers, things that feel disconnected from being a human.

But climate justice is about being human, so I'm hoping that my storytelling will, will bring in that human connection.

Our audience is gonna hear your story this evening; after they've done so, what would you hope that they most hold onto, that they learn?

I hope that people will hear in my story that it is very human to not know what to do.

A few years ago, I was leaning against a radiator in a cramped, sweaty legislator's office in the Massachusetts State House, and it was uncomfortably quiet.

A member of my group had just asked a question, and there was an NPR reporter who was ferrying a microphone back and forth between us, and she held the microphone up to the legislator's mouth, and her lips were moving, but no words were coming out.

As I listened to the legislator fail to produce sound, and the seconds stretched on, I found myself feeling sympathetic, and I was transported back five years to another cramped, sweaty room: my old classroom in Revere High School.

I just clicked pause on a documentary which was telling us how, despite the many disasters that are already unfolding, things are about to get much worse.

And every day, fossil fuel companies are spending millions of dollars-- millions of dollars a day-- to look for more fuels that we cannot afford to burn.

So I click pause, and that's when a student in the front row, Morgan, raises her hand and asks a question I was not prepared for.

"So, why aren't we doing something about this?"

(exhales) And I looked out at my sea of students, and I did not know what to say.

Climate change was not some far-off abstract concept to them.

I had immigrants from all continents in my classroom.

So this includes countries that are already ravaged by floods and forest fires and droughts and climate-induced war.

Them, sitting next to students who had been in the area for generations.

And by the area, I mean close to Revere Beach, and upwind of Logan Airport, where they experience some of the worst climate flooding and climate-induced air pollution in the state.

And then, in the back right-hand corner of my class was my student Sam.

She was usually a happy-go-lucky person, as passionate about biology as about basketball.

And in that silence, her face was a mask.

Her mom, single mother with disabilities, would end up spending, um, her retirement savings to replace the family's only car, which was totaled in a historic flood, so that she could continue to drive Sam to basketball practice.

So when Morgan asked, "Why aren't we doing something about this?"

and I failed to produce sound, all I could hear in my head was this voice saying, "Does anything you do matter?"

The words that eventually came out were "Great question!"

(awkward chuckle) And we sort of muddled our way through the rest of the lesson.

But in the days that follow, I could not stop thinking about this.

I was, as the young people say, shook by Morgan's question.

I would be up late nights looking at my lesson plans, thinking, you know, with that voice in my head saying, "Does any of this matter?"

And it wasn't until about a year later that I had a sense of what did.

25 students of mine and myself would find ourselves in the streets of New York City.

See, it turns out that my students also shared my concerns.

We had started a club; it was called Revere Environmental Voice, or REV for short.

And eventually we decided to participate in the People's Climate March on September 21, 2014.

And the theme of the event, the organizers told us, was "Sound the Alarm on Climate Change."

And so, as the organizers had told us, at 12:58, everybody in New York City went silent.

All I could hear was the pad of people's shoes on the concrete, and the electric whine of the buildings around us.

Somewhere in the masses, a person reached their arms up like this, like they were embracing the atmosphere.

And then 600,000 other arms went up the same, and we just walked like this.

And then-- 1: 00, the alarm sounds.

A huge tsunami of sound washes down the avenue.

Drums, vuvuzelas, noisemakers.

We're screaming.

We're shouting at the top of our lungs.

One of my students holds up her homemade picture frame, puts it around her face, and leads my students in their chant: "We are the future, framing the future."

On the drive home, Sam turned to me and said, "Mr. Bein, I think we really made a difference today."

And something shifted in me.

I felt that I-- we-- had, for the first time, connected to the larger movement.

Now, the spell was broken by the time I returned to class on Monday morning, and we had to continue preparing for the Massachusetts state biology test.

As REV's work grew more expansive and more beautiful, it became harder and harder for us to weave it meaningfully into the class, where it would actually be accessible to all of my students.

I actually ended up designing a version of the curriculum that would treat environmental justice as a year-long theme.

But when I showed it to my supervisors, they got nervous.

So, I quit.

Because when Morgan asked me, "Why aren't we doing something about this?"

she gave me the gift of silence.

Silence to reach deeply into myself, past the excuses, past the busy work, past the easy answers, and get to the work that truly matters.

And while I love DNA polymerase and independent variables and mitochondria more than just about any human, for most of our students, other things matter more.

And that is why, five years later, I would find myself in a cramped, sweaty legislator's office in the Massachusetts State House with no one other than Sam herself, a college student by then, who had joined my program at the youth-founded nonprofit Our Climate.

And I was listening to Sam tell her legislator her climate justice story and ask questions.

Difficult questions, about legislation that we had helped to write that went to committee and mysteriously died there.

Committees which, by the way, in our fair state of Massachusetts, are for some reason exempt from the public record.

And so while I watched her legislator struggle to produce words, and I could practically hear the voices shouting in her head, in that moment, the voices in my own head were, for a change, silent.

Thank you.

(applause) deNAPOLI: My name is Dyan deNapoli.

I'm better known as The Penguin Lady.

I live on the North Shore of Boston and I am a penguin expert, an author, and a public speaker.

I'm just wondering, what are some facts that people might not know about penguins?

I think the number one fact is that they do have knees.

(laughing): So that's the number one question I get.

Do penguins have knees or not?

And they do.

And that most species are actually threatened or endangered and their populations are, are crashing precipitously.

What can a person do, like, you know, just at your... at home, what are steps that you could take?

Because climate change, global warming is the number one threat to penguins, I always say, you know, one of the best things you can do for penguins and the greater environment that they're living in is to determine your own carbon footprint.

So there's all these carbon footprint calculators online that you can go to and, and figure out, you know, how much carbon am I putting into the atmosphere.

If you want to do something more specific, I always say you can donate to one of these penguin rescue centers that are throughout the Southern Hemisphere.

Tonight, what would you hope that our viewers take away from the story that you're going to share with us?

That we don't really know what we're capable of until we're tested.

And that we all are actually capable of much more than we even know.

And also that it's never too late to pursue or achieve a dream.

The first time I held a penguin in my arms, I instantly fell in love.

His name was Sanccob, and he was this tiny African penguin chick, and he was ridiculously adorable.

He was all belly and big feet, and he was covered in this soft, fluffy down, and he reminded me of my first pet-- a soft, fluffy bunny named Lilac.

I've always been a huge animal lover.

So when I first learned about endangered species as a kid, I was traumatized.

And I've always felt deep down that I was meant to help those animals somehow.

But I always wondered, what could I possibly do?

At 31, I went back to college to become a veterinary nurse and I met Sanccob during an internship at the New England Aquarium.

He was named after a rescue center in Cape Town South Africa that saves African penguins, which are now an endangered species.

Five years later, I'd be at that rescue center holding a wild African penguin in my arms.

Only this one would be covered with oil.

In June of 2000, a ship named Treasure sank near Cape Town and 20,000 African penguins were oiled.

In the blink of an eye, these birds were in a harrowing fight for their lives.

I was now penguin staff at the aquarium and a week later I was on a plane to Cape Town to help with the rescue.

And thousands of eager but completely inexperienced local volunteers also showed up to help us.

And nothing can ever really prepare you for walking into a massive warehouse filled with thousands of penguins that are coated in thick black oil and in a state of shock.

Penguins are normally loud, boisterous birds and they're constantly honking and braying and fighting each other.

But these penguins were standing statue still and they were completely silent.

It was a surreal and devastating scene.

And I quickly realized I'd have to shut down my emotions to get through this because it was just too painful to take in the suffering of so many animals.

At the end of our first day there, two of us were put in charge of running a huge room with more than 4,000 penguins in it.

It was the most terrifying moment of my life.

I had no idea how we were even supposed to do this.

This was the largest animal rescue ever attempted.

And the pressure was tremendous because the future survival of an entire species was literally at stake.

And in our hands.

What if penguins died because I screwed up?

Each day, we'd have to train and supervise more than 200 volunteers in our room alone and keep our 4,000 penguins alive until it was their turn to be washed.

For many birds, this could be a month-long wait.

Until then, every penguin had to be force fed every day, which could be hazardous.

First, we'd have to catch a penguin, but they were in these round pens, and so with no way to corner them, we'd end up chasing each other around the pens in circles like some Keystone Cops routine.

Once we finally did catch a penguin, we'd have to pry open their beak and shove several fish down their throats.

But they were fighting us and ripping our flesh with their razor-sharp beaks.

One of our volunteers was bitten completely through her lip by the penguin she was feeding.

Our grueling days ran from dawn to midnight and there wasn't even time to stop and eat.

The stress was intense, and relentless, and I didn't know we'd have PTSD afterwards.

Every morning after getting home, I would wake up and think that there were thousands of oiled penguins filling my apartment, and that I'd have to take care of them all by myself.

Or that for months afterwards, I would struggle to find any meaning or purpose in life.

Because compared to saving all those penguins, nothing seemed important.

Of those 4,000 penguins in our room, there's one penguin that still haunts me to this day.

One morning, a volunteer handed me this lifeless, emaciated penguin and begged me to bring it to the I.C.U.

I instantly knew this bird was way beyond saving, and the vets would just put it to sleep.

But in the chaos of running that room, it was several hours before I could finally break free long enough to bring the bird there.

I could have helped end its suffering sooner if I had just asked someone else to bring it to the I.C.U.

But in my frenzied state, that never even occurred to me.

And it brought back this very painful memory from my childhood that I had completely buried.

When I was 12, and my bunny Lilac was two, she got sick-- really sick.

And when we brought her to the vet, it was too late to save her, and she had to be put to sleep.

I was crushed and sobbed so hard I could barely breathe.

But my grief was mixed with guilt because I knew her death was really my fault.

You see, Lilac lived outside in a cage, and I hadn't been paying close enough attention to her.

And by the time I did notice she was sick, she was almost as lifeless as that penguin.

I may not have saved Lilac, or that penguin, but whenever I am feeling guilty about that one bird, I have to remind myself that we did save most of the penguins in our room.

And, thanks to an amazing army of volunteers, 90% of those 20,000 oiled penguins were saved.

It was the largest and most successful animal rescue in history.

And being a part of it was the greatest privilege of my life.

And on the flight back to Boston, the deeper personal significance of the rescue suddenly hit me.

I had just achieved my lifelong dream of doing something tangible to help save a species.

I was awestruck and deeply humbled.

And my next thought was, "If I die tomorrow, "I'll be okay with that because I feel as though I have just fulfilled my destiny."

KARP: My name is Sara Karp.

I am a 17-year-old junior in high school from Acton, Massachusetts.

And in the hours that I am not in school, I also am a youth climate organizer.

What would you hope to achieve when it comes to climate education in schools?

What would you love to see in that world?

We see climate change taught in science curriculums predominantly, right?

Like, people take an environmental science class, they learn about climate change.

I definitely view climate change as a really broad and kind of interdisciplinary issue, right?

Like, it is kind of covering so many aspects of society and touching sort of just so many parts of how our world operates, that to me, it doesn't make sense to kind of only teach about it in the context of the science.

And so, I would love to see climate change taught in history classes, in English classes.

Do you feel that storytelling is important to your work?

And, if so, how?

We build movements to fight and create new narratives.

And those narratives are produced by the stories that everybody is telling about their experiences.

And so, I definitely think we can't construct movements kind of without having an element of storytelling.

It's spring of my sophomore year of high school, and I am standing quite literally at the foot of our nation's Capitol.

I got my little professional outfit on, and I got one AirPod in playing a jazz beat that I tap my foot to as I wait.

And I feel so important.

You see, I was waiting for what felt like a penultimate moment in my young life as a climate organizer.

I, Sara Karp, was about to go lobby Congress.

Eventually, I pick up my things and, along with my fellow high school-age lobbyists, navigate through a maze of congressional hallways to our first meeting of the day with Rep. Lois Frankel.

Slowly, I turn the knob on the door and we walk in.

30 minutes later, we walk back out, loudly high-fiving as we try to keep our chill, not trying to present as the starry-eyed kids who had just seen, really seen, national politics for the first time.

And yet, as we're alone in the elevator minutes later, I turn to them and say something along the lines of, "Guys, we just talked to a congresswoman "about climate education.

We are so cool!"

(laughter, smattering of applause) My next three days in D.C. pass in a whirlwind.

I feel this electric buzz of change all around me, and then, I leave.

My flight gets into Boston at around 11: 00 P.M.

I drive home, walk into a quiet, dark house, and slump down at the kitchen table.

I love this kitchen table.

In many ways, I think that it is the reason that I made it to D.C. in the first place.

I grew up with two older siblings and a family that loved to talk politics, especially over dinner.

And as a really little kid, I hated this.

I was constantly whining at them to stop talking about politics.

But eventually, I grew tired of this and instead, turned to reading the news nightly to keep up with the dinnertime debates.

Through many of these debates, and also a love of cooking all the food we ate, I found my way to local farms and farmers markets.

And eventually, propelled by the notion that climate change was making it harder to feed our communities, I found my way to the climate movement.

And yet, tonight, in the comfort of a seat at this table, my heart starts to sink.

I have come home to a slog of school assignments that I have to make up.

And I have also come home to the reality of my very own climate education campaign in shambles.

Months earlier, as part of my fellowship at the nonprofit Our Climate, I had helped write this bill to get climate change taught in our schools here in Massachusetts.

And let's just say, the advocacy process was not going exactly as I had planned.

(laughter) We had multiple versions of the bill drafts, and I was getting lots of emails from confused partner organizations.

Unfortunately for me, there was no clear campaign plan that had magically appeared in my Google Drive while I was away.

I let out a light groan.

I had just left D.C., and already I could feel myself searching for the next D.C.

The next moment that would feel big and exciting, that would affirm why I was even doing this in the first place.

And so, over the next couple of months, I'm continuing to plug away at the campaign.

We're getting some small wins, and I'm not celebrating them because I'm too busy daydreaming about bigger wins.

Like, I had this vision of a coalition that would bring together students, teachers, everybody involved in our schools to help plan for the effects of climate change on our schools.

Everything from, yes, teaching about climate change in the classroom, but also drafting plans for how we transport students to and from school during periods of intense flooding.

I had actually been talking to some folks who seem to share in this vision.

And so by summer, I find myself on a Zoom call.

I'm now an employee of Mass Audubon and we're all kind of just staring at this blank document.

We're trying to figure out, so how exactly does someone go about creating a coalition like this?

I learned the hard way that the answer to that question would not be my next D.C.

The first few months of the coalition-building process were agonizingly slow.

And so, on many days, "organizing" looks like this: I am sitting at my computer and I am retyping the same five sentences of our vision statement over and over just trying to get this thing in my head onto paper.

And at the end of many of those days, I just want to slam the computer shut and go, "I quit!

I'm done.

I walk away."

And I know then, and I know now, that I wasn't being serious.

I had said this statement too many times for it to mean anything, other than the fact that my search for D.C. was not sustainable.

And so, I go on Christmas break.

I don't think about work.

And I come back in early January to a long list of outreach emails that I need to send.

And so, on a rainy, cold Thursday, I drive myself home, I pull a chair up to the kitchen table, and I get ready to send those emails.

I notice about a half hour in that I'm kind of smiling to myself as I type.

I'm smiling because a girl that I met on the Governor's Youth Council just filled out our coalition interest form.

And also, I'm replying to a teacher that I met a year ago at a climate conference.

She is so excited about the work our coalition is doing.

I'm starting to realize that we do not build movements with lobby trips to D.C. We build movements by writing documents and spreadsheets.

We build movements by creating community and sharing the load of this work.

We build movements by sitting at the kitchen table.

I click "send," and I think maybe I have found my next D.C.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause)