Yessenia Funes:

Hello. To kick off our first episode of the season, we're talking to Tamara Toles O'Laughlin. She's an environmentalist with over 20 years of experience focused on equity and community. She was previously the North American Director for 350, an international climate organization. She might not design buildings or cities, but she's a different sort of architect. She's building a new culture within the climate justice movement, one of care and repair, to ensure leaders have the energy they need to keep doing the work.

I wanted to kick off the season with Tamara's voice because this work is essential, urgent, and needed. In order to succeed in taking down the bad guys fueling the climate crisis, bad guys like the fossil fuel industry, we need advocates who are healthy and who feel supported by their community. Instead, there's a lot of burnout and trauma, especially among women of color. If we're going to transition into more sustainable societies, that means building sustainability into the activism, too.

This is the Architectures of Planetary Well-being Podcast. I'm your host, Yessenia Funes.

Hello, everyone. We are here today with Tamara Toles O'Laughlin. She is an environmentalist with over 20 years of experience working on equity, access, and community. Some of you all may know her work previously as the North American Director for 350, an international climate organization. Right now, Tamara's focused on building a culture of care and repair within the climate community to ensure that leaders in the movement have the energy they need to keep doing the work. She herself does a range of work, from developing climate policy to protecting communities from pollution, and she's here with us today to get into all that and talk about sustainable movement-building.

Hey, Tamara.

Tamara Toles O'Laughlin:

Hey, how are you doing? Glad to be here.

YF:

Glad to have you with us. As you know, this podcast is sort of an exploration of architecture, design, climate, and the urgency around the intersection of all these themes. I wanted to firstly just ask, what do you think of architects? How do you think of this field?

TTO:

So last year I was interviewed by University of Pennsylvania Architecture Department, because they were trying to develop some shared language around equity in the building space. And so I've seen this question appearing since like 15, 20 years ago—when LEED certification was one entry point for folks trying to figure out how to fit into the work, when passive house design was moving in and out of the way people think about dealing with climate. Because for many decades, folks have been working on earth houses and earth ships, where people leverage the land as it is to build a home that is sustainable in the long term and can withstand a lot of things.

So, I feel like the work of environmental advocacy, the work of social justice—all of which has become the modern day climate and environmental movement—has always had a built environment component to it. It's just the soulsole part is what we're catching up on. So folks are starting to recognize that through millennia of Indigenous practices, we've always been building things. We've always been engineers and architects of the work. The question is whether or not that has a political lens to it and, increasingly, environment and climate are political. So we're seeing it there. And I think that the world of architecture is about how we design the future we’re going to live in, quite literally, and that will require us to have an equitable lens on the environment if we want the most people to experience it. So I do think there's some very natural complements between the discipline of architecture and the design elements of climate survival.

YF:

I'm curious, given the thinking that you've done on this space, would you consider yourself an architect?

TTO:

So, my training and my background is in environmental law and policy, which includes energy generation and transmission. So I have two degrees. One is a terminal degree in environmental law policy and the other’s a master's degree in environmental law policy that's focused on energy generation and transmission. And so I would say that as a person whose training is that of social engineering, I have to know that that's what I'm doing. Because to build policy to help the development of legislation, to make sure that the law works so that it's power with, not power over, you have to be a social engineer in order to show up for that work responsibly.

YF:

There's this quote that was shared with me that I want to share here with our listeners as well, and it says, “Architecture sits at the interconnection of bodies and environments. It shapes and creates environments for human bodies to find themselves in and care for in on an everyday level.” I personally haven't thought too much about architecture before diving into this work, and I think that some of your framing, it just feels really relevant and it's encouraging to hear that other folks in the space are already thinking of these connections and drawing these lines between their work and the world of architecture because it feels like a really urgent space to begin bringing climate advocacy into.

TTO:

And I'll just say that I think for folks who have been tracking the 50, 60, 70, 150 years of environmental work and the different parts of it—environmental justice, climate justice—where they meet largely has to do with time and how much we're careening towards a climate crisis that becomes… makes the world likely to be more or less habitable. And so I think architecture design and how people live is a huge part of the conversation on the climate justice part of the work, largely because when incidents like Katrina happened or failures of infrastructure happen, like Jackson, Mississippi, or determinations of politics happen, where we literally reroute clean water from communities to route it to businesses—these are all design choices. We're designing a system. And so I do think that as environmental justice blends with the work of climate justice, we move from talking just about what happens to people and how they're designed out of choice, to how people are designed into choice and climate justice.

YF:

That point, “designed into choice,” feels like an important one. I was hoping, Tamara, to hear a little bit about your own journey. I'm not sure how many of our listeners have followed your work over the years. We might have some listeners who are learning about you for the first time and learning about the work that you're doing in this space. I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey and your own background as an environmental expert advocate attorney, and the experiences and background that brought you to this point of understanding. I imagine that you didn't always have this clear lens on the intersection of all these issues, so I would love to hear a little bit about how you got here.

TTO:

So my mom worked for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. And so as a part of her work in the early ’90s, late ’90s, she spent a lot of time learning about what we now have up and running as our wastewater infrastructure throughout the state of New York, which involves a bunch of different municipalities, territories, folks with different jurisdiction—but also is about giant bodies of water that have to be protected by an environmental police force that populate the places where these reservoirs and bodies of water are kept safe so that people can drink it all over the place.

When I was a little kid, I understood that to mean that my mom was a water protector and that she would take me on a tour to the Croton Reservoir or further up the Hudson or to see the four or five different massive reservoirs, massive by New York standards. We’re not talking about the Great Lakes, which are a whole ’nother conversation. But that work of making sure the water could be safe, so people who live hundreds of miles of pipeline away—moving that water from one part of New York to another part—gave me a sense that there was a network of things happening or conspiring in favor of folks who have access to clean water. It didn't just happen by accident.

She was there when they started to bill for it. She was there when they started to figure out how they might charge for something that is free to everybody. And so watching her evolve as the city developed the lens on how to both preserve water and protect it, is a part of why I thought about it. As a kid who lived in Brooklyn and the city, my interfaces with the natural world came from Prospect Park, which I grew up very near to. It was my everyday park. So I had this backyard that I shared with thousands of other people every day. And so all of those are design elements. I grew up in the time of Greenstreets, which means somebody else, before I was born, made an argument that people needed to have access to parks. And so despite the fact that there's real controversy in how those parks got built and on whose land they were built and over whose rights and bodies they were built, it also meant that the design elements of the place that I live had urban and intentionally not-urban components to it.

And so all of that is very much along the lens of social architecture and design: whether you have access to drinking water, all the pipes that it takes to run from a reservoir in Upstate through your local interchange to the buildings and pipelines inside your building, in your walls, in your house, in your bathroom. I was a kid who had the pleasure of knowing that when you turn your water on the tap, you're actually getting this water that comes from this other place. My mom took me to it. You could fit a car in there. There was a car in there. You could fit an animal in there. And so I was a kid at the playground who was giving people way too much information that they didn't necessarily want when I was a kid. And because of the rules, you can go to the clean side of Prospect Park, which is a thing that every parent that lived within Prospect Park would tell you. Where's the clean part? Oh, you'll know when you reach the part you're not supposed to be at.

But all of these things, as I became an adult, it was really clear to me that other folks in a policy realm that I wasn't yet involved in fought over where trees would be placed, how many people would have access to green space, whether or not the money that came from the census meant that there had to be a patch of grass and a park within X amount of feet of every place where there are kids that are playing, or how close schools are.

And so I think when we start to look at it, our very life experiences are shaped by it. When I went to Vermont Law School, Pat Parenteau, who is a recently retired professor from that school, dubbed me an “urban environmentalist,” and I was confused. I was like, “what does that mean? This seems insulting. What do you mean, ‘urban environmentalist’?” He was like, “Because you came to this work in a way that's not very normal.” And I thought, interesting. But he wasn't completely out of touch with the way he would define how I came to this work, because it just so happened that I noticed the ways that my mom's work helped to deliver water to folks who didn't necessarily think about how it got to them—or the idea that I would notice the policy program that would give everybody access to Greenstreets so that folks could have experiences like mine, where they spend most of their childhood inside of a park or in grass or on the water because it was the public's playground.

And so when I rolled up to Vermont Law School, one of my classmates was drying out an animal that he had killed on the roof of his car. This was the first day of law school, of our classes. And I was like, “there's a dead animal on top of your car.” He’s like, “yeah, I'm drying it out. It's going to be there all winter. You want to come over to my house for dinner?” And I was totally freaked out. And then he and I went into the same Constitutional Law class and I was like, “so you're going to eat that?” And he’s like, “yeah, why do you think I'm an environmentalist? If he doesn't have good food to eat, I don't have good food to eat.” And at that exact moment I realized what Pat Parenteau meant, which is that each of us came to the Law School to do something different, to protect a place that we love, which isn't really very different at all. So his calling me an “urban environmentalist” was suggesting that my view of what is the environment is different than another view. I have some questions about normalizing which of those makes more sense, since we did build the city out of the country everywhere we've ever done that. But it was an important point that that guy who was drying an animal on the top of his car, waiting for it to get to his house, has just as much interest in whether or not there is clean water and clean air as I do. We're just trying to protect different people.

YF:

And since then, you've done even more urgent and necessary community-based work. I think your latest project, Climate Critical Earth, is a really powerful manifestation of what you've built in the decades since then. I want to hear you just share a little bit more about what Climate Critical Earth is, and share with our listeners here about this new project you launched. Because I do think that what you're creating with this space is something that we're going to need a lot more of, not only in the climate movement, but across social justice movements. So yeah, break it down for us what you're doing with Climate Critical Earth.

TTO:

Thank you so much for asking. I think as a person who has a reputation for doing things that maybe aren't common and then continuing to do it, Climate Critical Earth is really a powerful intervention. As a person who's been in this work for almost all of my adult life, some 25 years since I became an adult, I have managed to organize campaigns and build demands and help people build policies that speak to the work. And as someone who has happened to do a lot of my work while , I was the executive director of the Maryland Environmental Health Network, which had a statewide coalition called Community of Communities, which is one of my favorite organizing bodies of all time—including 350, because that particular branch of the movement was about going door-to-door across the state to help people think about how climate was impacting them.

And that group developed a multigenerational practice of folks who were throwing down on behalf of their local and global concern around environment. And what I mean by that is that there were folks—some of the most seasoned activists, the eldest folks—were the ones who were rowdy. “We're ripping off our clothes and protesting outside the governor's house.” And I would say, “well, I think we should just circulate a petition first and see if they know what we’re…” But they were always the ones who were excited. They were like, “I have grandkids who need a quality of life that I never had.” And so moving from being someone who was focused on the environmental health impacts and what that means to people gave me access to the social determinants of health as a framework—the idea that people don't just land where they are, they designed into it. And so in some ways, the social determinants of health are like a blueprint or a coda that really easily connects to the functions of society that we think are natural because we're born into them, but are actually designed by people who came before us—and frankly places where we need to ask questions.

So moving into my work at 350, so much of that was focused on mobilizing as a tactic to revoke the social license of people who, just because we were born with them running things, doesn't mean we need to continue doing that. In my role as the CEO and president of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, I spent a lot of time talking with different kinds of folks who view the movement differently, but to have a real clarity around the idea that the revolution must be resourced. And that was always true, because we can't just go outside with ideals. We need to have access to policy, practice, and programs that allow us to be able to move what we want to see into a future where it happens.

So Climate Critical Earth was born out of 25 years of leading teams of people and connecting the dots on big things and helping them advocate against municipalities, local governments, states and multinational organizations where people are telling you, “you don't have a right to a voice.” And over the course of that time, I realized that the biggest resource we have are the people. So Climate Critical Earth is really an intervention that recognizes that we have no chance of averting climate disaster if we don't take care of the people who fight for the planet. The people themselves are a resource, whether they're practitioners or organizers or activists, they're the ones who make survival possible by connecting with communities and resourcing them and moving money to and through communities.

But what I've seen in every place I've ever been is that, because we don't take care of people, we ask broken folks to help us build the revolution. And I think it's entirely inappropriate for us to do that because then we burn out people who are bright, people who are talented, people who are caring, because so much of this work is so close to our identity that we don't know how to stop. It's pretty irresistible. If you've ever been in a crisis situation, you have seen people do things they don't do every day. It's pretty intoxicating. If you watch someone save a baby from a car and they lift up a car, or you watch someone help a neighbor who's struggling and can't swim to avoid a flood, every day you have the opportunity to see people operate at a higher level than they do because it's literally life or death.

And what Climate Critical Earth really helps people to recognize is that we can't run our lives at that level. If we don't have radical rest, if we don't develop care practices, if we don't build in restorative work for ourselves, we can't demand restorative practice of the status quo. And we have to do that together because the enemy of our progress is trying to solve any of these problems on our own. So Climate Critical Earth has really been thoughtful about developing programs and practices and toolkits for people to be able to take back out into the movement, so that we develop new models of leadership. Leadership can't just be the person in front of the podium. It can't just be the person who's getting arrested. It can't just be the person who is holding a sign. It also has to be that person at rest, having a break, enjoying some time, eating good food, smiling, laughing with other people—and not just gallows humor that is born of exhaustion.

And so really in my last couple of roles, as I've become more senior in the work, it's clear to me that if we don't make an intention to invest in people, we lose folks. And specifically for Black, Indigenous, and all people of color, trans community, and women, basically anyone who we can erase and whose identity is really threatened by the climate crisis—if they're in this work, they're even more vulnerable to the kind of burnout that we're talking about because their actual identity, the way they live, is tied into the work they're trying to do, which means they put endless energy into solving the problem and then burn out when we need them most. I have the fortune of knowing that my role is only one part of an anti-racist practice and a radical care program. Climate Critical Earth is an intervention to try to build up the stores of people who can deliver that, so that we change the model of working. So it isn't “fight until you die.” It's fight, rest, and return.

YF:

Yes. And it feels like such a relevant moment to launch this kind of organization. Self-care and rest became such dominating narratives during the pandemic, and there have been all these stories and headlines about burnout, but I don't know that this discussion has actually translated into action and changes in the workplace. And for many folks, their job is just the job. They go to work every day, they do what they got to do, they go home. But I think what folks on the outside forget about is that for folks doing climate and environmental work, it's not just a job, right?

TTO:

That’s right.

YF:

It's much deeper than that. Like you said, it is life or death for so many of us doing this work. And so I just wanted to say I appreciate this organization because I'm hoping, and I'm hopeful, that what you're building here will have a ripple effect because we do need folks to be in for the long run, not just go hard until they can't anymore. And with that, Tamara, I would love to just hear some more specifics. How is Climate Critical Earth accomplishing this? I know that there was a retreat that you held earlier this month. I know by the time this episode comes out, you would've had your second retreat, which I'll be joining.

TTO:

Yes.

YF:

Would love to just have you break down for folks how you accomplish this work, and hopefully this is a model that others can replicate as well.

TTO:

So we have some principles which really relate to what I was mentioning previously, which is that yes, we are climate warriors; yes, we're environmental advocates. But we are also creative. We are also co-powering, which means we don't do any of this alone and we do it with joy. We are caring, because asking how you are doing and waiting for an answer is a practice. We can't afford to just expect people because their work is good, that their lives are good. And recognizing that our humanity makes us really, really, really essential.

I can say part of why we've had a couple of programs I'm really excited about, which come out of four different spaces. We have a community care and repair space where folks can come and bring themselves to try to begin to develop a practice that is counterintuitive. We tell you, focus on your work, make the magic, measurable things happen, and then build out a report that makes other people want to do it with you. So, building a care and repair space where we form a community where other folks who are doing this says, you have a right to rest, you might be out-of-touch doing it. Let's start to practice some of that at the individual level and as a community of people who will help you to hold up those practices.

And then we have a community core space because sometimes people are... Well, I will say a lot of folks that I have known are trauma-bonded to work. You come. You do something incredible. You build some. You have an amazing campaign or a program with folks, and then you realize the infrastructure for how you deliver it is really depleting you. You don't have enough time off. You don't have as many days. There isn't a sabbatical program that matters. So the average sabbatical program in an environmental organization is about five years, while Black and Brown, Indigenous people and trans folks don't make it to a five-year anniversary in most organizations.

So rethinking whether or not five is an appropriate number for people who are experiencing harm at home and at work and lateral violence in between, that's one of those things that becomes a practice that we focus on in real time. What's the toolkit? Who do you need to talk to? How do you raise that this issue or well-meaning meaning policy just isn't working for your community in the context of your actual work? So in that community core space, we start to connect the dots on how you showing up for yourself allows you to show up better in a way for you to be an advocate with and for communities that you support, so you can figure out: is this a safe space to even do this work?

Well, our third space is our practitioner space for folks who often do individual projects, advising, supporting folks, mentoring, coaching, where they just want to take a cool idea and see what would happen if they work with someone else. So some of our advisors include Mary Annaïse Heglar, Ife Kilimanjaro, Jasmine Sanders from Our Climate, and Lorraine Chiponda from Power Shift Africa. There are folks who are in this space who are often building a thing that solves today's problem and practicing something that they think might solve tomorrow's problem. So the practitioner's space is where you show up and say, “I have an idea, is there anybody else who wants to work on it with me?” And the global advisor space is really a multinational place where that happens. So big ideas, like climate reparations, which have been the subject of COP27 and so many other spaces over the next few years—and I guarantee you the next few years to come—that's the kind of place where you would bring a big project like that, because it involves multiple people thinking about the same problem happening in lots of places, figuring out what the language is.

And so through these three or four offerings, we are really thinking about the whole person who goes back to a whole community. The retreat that you mentioned is a spur in the community care and repair space. So our very first retreat, the theme was, what's your relationship to power? Because in 25 years of doing this work, I have watched incredible leaders have a shorter lifespan in the work than they need because the organization they've gone to, and the people they've worked with, have never seen a thing like what they asked to bring there. And so as a person who spends a lot of time working with people across networks, across the sector, it really is important that—and not just developing the practice—but sending people back to a place where they could do it without harm is really important.

So at the retreats, we start to dig in on what's your relationship to power, because if you don't know what your relationship to power is, and you have triggers related to how you've seen power play out in your life, it becomes very difficult to imagine something new. So this next retreat that we are going to, which will have happened by the time that this episode airs, is really about lateral violence and what happens when your own resume is a series of instances where you have survived lateral violence and the system hasn't quite changed enough to catch up with you. And that came from lots of conversations that have happened in the community with folks who have said that, when they go to an interview after surviving a place that is flawed in all the ways that we've started to talk about, they have to explain why they haven't died yet. And it's triggering to say, “we agreed that this work is racist. We've agreed that this is not a safe space for people in bodies other than those who have been normalized by the decisions we have made about who gets to do environmental work.” And then a person in any of those bodies goes to an interview and says, “here I am.” And the first question they get asked is, “so why have you moved around so much?”

YF:

And you're talking about a job interview, right?

TTO:

Yeah. I'm talking about the experience of being a person who does this work for a living. I've talked to people who are CEOs, people who are trustees, people who are program officers, people who are organizers and activists. And so many of them have stories about what it means to try to explain to people that you buck the system and the system hasn't fallen yet as you try to move about your work. So we're really going to spend some time thinking about: how do we shift not just us, but how do we shift the context we're in so that individual people showing up to do the work we need everybody to do, don't have to do it in a context where they have to prove why it is the system isn't working for them in the individual races.

YF:

And I know a big theme within this work is the sustainability of the movement and the ability of the movement to survive long term because the climate crisis is here for decades, potentially centuries, to come. And addressing it and reversing some of these effects is going to take a tremendous, tremendous... “Tremendous” doesn't even feel like it encapsulates the effort that's going to be required to save folks, right

TTO:

Yeah.

YF:

What is the ideal outcome that you're hoping for here? What is it that we need to see change concretely within the movement so that we can make it so that we have a leaderful movement—I know that’s a term we like to use—and a movement that isn't losing our Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in leadership positions?

TTO:

Well, I think we at Climate Critical Earth really hold that we are multigenerational, we are multiracial, we are feminists, we are caring, we are co-generative. There's so many things that could describe how we are. We want a workplace that reflects that. And I think concretely things we would like to see—we would like to see organizations that are environmental organizations set aside money, money. Like money, the place where we tell the real stories about what we care about. If you want to know what someone's priorities are, look at their budget. That's true whether we're talking about an individual person or an organization. We would like to see a line item of resources going towards people having this kind of care as a part of their work. So if we're going to build a 60-million-dollar plan to fight coal or oil or gas, what percentage of that is going to make sure that the people who do it have actual rest practice, have refreshers, and have other people who could step into that work so that the multi-year project can continue? We can't just hire two or three really amazing folks as rock stars, expect them to live an infinitely stressful life, and then somehow be okay to get us from point A to point B in the work. So some of it is about making sure that the whole movement reconsiders what it calls “good work,” what it calls “success.”

For other folks, it's macro-level changes. Being able to go back to your job that you love dearly, trauma-bonded or not, and say, “here are some tools to make this a more habitable existence for me and my colleagues. And here's what we want to see happen in our context.” So some of it is offering folks the opportunity to brainstorm about how the individual organization does or doesn't offer this. And to be able to go back with some practices and some tools and some support to make demands for their own humanity.

For others, it's demanding a line item that allows people, that isn't seen as professional development—meaning you need it to go back to your work—you just need it to be a person. And so between making those demands, making sure it's movement-wide and supporting generalized monitoring. So, one of the things that's currently on the street is a survey on burnout in the climate environment and energy and conservation sector, largely because we need to make sure that on a regular basis we're checking to see how people are doing, not based on where they are, but as a movement, recognizing that all of us play different parts in the movement. So this kind of survey is the kind of thing that allows us to overcome the individual having to defend a system that doesn't work for people. So being able to say, “this percentage of people are experiencing burnout, this percentage of people are recovering from it,” allows us to make some space for the demands for more accountability internally, more resources towards this activity, and more actual policies and practices that allow people to design how they work safely in context.

YF:

Accountability feels like such an important point here that I don't think we talk enough about, and the need to hold people in power accountable beyond our elected officials, but also the folks who are building and designing the movement that we all exist within. And so much of what you shared here, Tamara, the changes that you've outlined here, these organizational changes, I'm really curious to hear how you see these organizational changes translate into environmental and infrastructural changes that, as a society, we need—just bringing it back home to the point of this podcast, architecture and design. How do these organizational changes bring us closer to this world that we need to build so urgently for climate justice?

TTO:

So if you think about building principles, regardless of what structure you're building, every one of us learned in school that if you don't have a good foundation, the rest of it is pretty immaterial, because it's not going to last very long.

YF:

That's right.

TTO:

While I'm a part of other interventions like the Green Leadership Trust, which is about affecting what CEOs do in the work, or EGA, where we're trying to affect how whole parts of resourcing happen in the movement, Climate Critical Earth is focused on the foundation. So we recognize that the climate movement itself, environment itself, is in a dysfunctional spiral that shows up in this organization and that organization and the next one, too. But the real problem is not any specific thing happening in an org or individual people. It's that we have a culture of disposability. And we can't just demand sustainability in products and inputs in external policies, in getting targets for cutting emissions, if the people are disposable.

There was a founder who I worked with in a previous part of my work, and I asked, as a person who could make investments in my staff team, we need to bring in some stuff to support folks because I'm seeing a level of burnout. And when I asked the person if we could do it, they said, “why are you so focused on this? We'll just get new people.” And that conversation is what gave birth to Climate Critical Earth, because it dawned on me that what they were actually saying is that disposability culture is our culture. And so Climate Critical Earth says disposability culture got us into the climate crisis. We need a different type of leadership. We need a different type of leader. We need a different type of organizational assessment to get us out of it. We got to expect more from people than just showing up and doing great work. And that means we’ve got to invest in people like we want more of that.

YF:

Right. And this investment in the people is what can then translate into investment in our communities, and these transformational changes that'll actually improve our quality of life, our air quality, just the general quality of our futures.

TTO:

You've got it. Because at the end of the day, if the foundation for how we move people through campaigns, through demands, through massive movement actions, are that we have individuals who are the foundation of the work, who can partner with people to have power with rather than power over, who can create a sense of belonging—they’ve got to know what that actually feels like in order to be a partner to somebody else. There are folks in this work who do this because their community is on the line, who don't do it for any money at all, and at the end of the day, if they get a chance to partner with someone who has the privilege of being an activist or an organizer or a strategist in this work for their living, the two of them getting together with both of them being deeply burnt out—one because they're being ignored by the system, and the other one because they're being continuously extracted from in the work culture—the two of them are not going to come up with the solutions we need to make change.

It goes against everything we've ever done to steward this Earth before now, to expect us to use any single tool of our shared work until it's broken. And the proposition is that the work itself is broken, which means it doesn't partner with communities well, which means it doesn't build the kinds of demands that can make up change, and it doesn't set us up to do our part of it. If we are in a multigenerational work to do the best work we can to steward the Earth, we have to be available for it so that we inspire the next generation to get involved in what is really complicated, difficult, and painful work. If we don't have a practice of healing, of care, of repair, of restoration, then we don't create that example for the other parts of our community that need to also be taken a part of this practice. There are so many strong women, so many strong human beings standing in a gap for their communities. And so many of my colleagues who are buried because they died doing work they love without enough care and support. And when they left, they took institutional information that is going to take us decades to get back. So I would say that Climate Critical Earth is doing something we need now for a future we are depending on.

YF:

I feel like this is a pretty powerful ending, Tamara, to our conversation. And I wanted to ask you to bring forth a quote that you hold dear that helps you sort of maintain the optimism and spirit necessary to move forward, given the difficulty of this work. I wonder if there's a quote that speaks to you during these moments.

TTO:

So there are tons. I would say we're in a leaderful movement, but also a quoteful movement. There's a quote that, funnily enough, it's attributed to a few different people—Montague, Harry Truman, a bunch of other folks—and I'm pretty sure, based on what the quote is, they wouldn't care who gets the credit. The quote is, "It's surprising what you can get done if you don't care who gets the credit."

And so, most people would attribute that to Harry S. Truman, even though plenty of people have said it across time. Because at the end of the day, that's what this work is about, is recognizing that we're all leaderful. We all have capacity and energy to do our part of this long-arc work, like a long arc, hundreds of years of long-arc work. But only if we do it as though who we are doing it with is as important as what we're trying to accomplish. Our name being on it, our brand being on it, is it more important than getting it done?

YF:

And the urgency of this moment definitely requires that we get it done first and foremost.

TTO:

Yeah, and what we're asking for is that people recognize that getting it done means resting is also the work.

YF:

100%. Well, Tamara, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing all this wisdom with us today. It's such a pleasure always talking with you. Can't wait to see you again soon.

TTO:

Thank you so much. Glad for having me.

Audio:

Architectures of Planetary Well-Being is a podcast of revisions, a media initiative supported by re:arc institute, a philanthropic organization committed to supporting architectures of planetary well-being. For more information on re:arc, please visit www.rearc.institute. This season is hosted by Yessenia Funes. For more information on her work, you can follow her online at @yessfun, Y-E-S-S-F-U-N, and in her work, The Frontline at Atmos magazine. This podcast is produced by Minah Kwon and Andi Kristins. Music by In Atlas.