Roundtable Discussion: Ecological Design & Activism in an Age of Reactionary Politics

Jessie Croteau: Thank you everyone for coming. I am Jessie Croteau, a graduate fellow of the Ecological Design Collective.

The EDC is a non-profit project founded by researchers and community organizations in Baltimore and a growing community around the world. A collaborative initiative focused on addressing ecological crises through democratic and inclusive design, the EDC emphasizes social, economic, and environmental justice by calling on thinkers, artists, activists, designers, and the community to foster sustainable practice. If you have not already done so, please join our community!

This event is the culmination of our series on Environmental Futures in a Time of Reactionary Politics which was conceived after the 2024 US elections.  The EDC has always sought to cultivate a space for envisioning possible futures grounded in environmental resilience, justice, and imagination. But as recent global shifts in politics and governance cast shadows on efforts to foster transformative change, we find ourselves confronted with a vacuation of futures and what once felt possible. Reactionary turns in many nations are constraining spaces for ideas, and for some, it might feel as though pathways toward equitable and ecologically grounded futures are narrowing. How can we think about ecological and equitable futures as the government and policy options are a receding space of intervention? What role and responsibilities do spaces like the EDC and the university have to step into the void left by these shifts? While conventional institutions may falter in their capacity to imagine, let alone enact, sustainable futures, how can other spaces remain a dynamic, inclusive, and collaborative space for exactly this purpose? How do we build a community that holds the potential to nurture visions of futures that may seem obscured or forgotten amid prevailing political tides?

To explore these themes we have brought together thinkers from across Baltimore.

Anand Pandian is a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times, and Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down, forthcoming from Stanford University Press. A former department chair of anthropology, he serves now as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. He also serves as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective.

Nicole Labruto is the Director of the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities program at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include agriculture, energy, plant-human relations, science and technology studies, anthropology of sustainability, environmental anthropology, Brazil, Mozambique, Latin America, Africa. She also serves as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective.

Samuel Myers is a Founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health. With faculty Director roles at the Planetary Health Alliance and the new Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health, he oversees multi-institutional efforts focused on understanding and quantifying the human health of global environmental change and translating that understanding into action globally. He is the co-editor with Howard Frumkin of Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves, which was voted one of the 25 Best Books of All Time by American Journal of Health Promotion in 2021. He has authored over 100 peer reviewed articles and book chapters.

PJ Brendese is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His research spans critical race theory, comparative political thought, decolonial theory, Indigenous political thought, environmental racism, and the politics of memory and temporality. Most recently, Professor Brendese is the author of Segregated Time (Oxford University Press, 2023) which investigates how racial segregation not only takes space but takes time as well. Professor Brendese’s first book, The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics (Rochester University Press, 2014), examines how political power affects what is available to be remembered, who is allowed to recall the past, and where and when past events can be commemorated. 

Samia Rab Kirchner is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Morgan State University. She has taught architecture at the American University of Sharjah in the UAE, the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Georgia Institute of Technology. She makes, studies, and analyzes architecture that contributes to urban civic identity, with a focus on the transformative role of water in the design and redevelopment of port cities. As Community Engagement Theme Team Lead on the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC), she is developing new approaches for climate scientists to work in close partnership with the citizens of east and west Baltimore, collaboratively identifying community priorities that guide the scientific questions being asked. She serves as Board Member of the Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, as the Middle East Area Editor for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, and as Editorial Member of the Journal of Arabian Studies.

Thank you everyone for joining us.

For this conversation the roundtable members will give their opening remarks and then we will open the discussion to questions from the audience. But to begin, I invite each of you to respond with thoughts to the following guiding questions

• How can we imagine futures that exist beyond the limitations of conventional governmental and institutional frameworks?
• What strategies can we employ to resist the forces that constrain our capacity to envision alternative possibilities?
• What does environmental activism look like in this era of reactionary politics, and how can we learn from comparative, global perspectives on these challenges?

We will have each of the roundtable members talk for 3-5 minutes on all 3 of those questions, and then we will open it up to our audience for their questions and comments.

Samia Kirchner: It is an honor to be asked these very critical questions. You have caught me on a very good day. I am very hopeful today.

To answer these questions, we need to start building new institutions just like EDC, just like the ones that I have just visited in Morocco during the spring break—the Amal Center, the Center for Languages and Cultures. These are all vertically integrated new institutions where people are living out their dreams by being very cohesive, collaborative, and conscious of the world we live in.

I am working on a proposal for a Center for Vertically Integrated Built Environment Studies. The inspiration came from what I saw recently in Morocco—the new centers that are coming up without government support, not bypassing government protocols, but just creating things that have a vibe. And, interestingly enough, my new center that I am thinking of, the Vertically Integrated Built Environment Studies, its acronym will be VIBES.

Jessie Croteau: Thank you so much for starting us off Samia. Nicole, would you like to go next?

Nicole Labruto: Happy to go, absolutely. Thank you, Samia, and thank you for your thoughts. I completely agree. Thank you so much, and thanks for organizing this, Jessie—it is a pleasure to be here.

When I looked at the really wonderful questions you sent, two themes came to mind. One has to do with building institutions, as Samia said, but looking for leadership from those who have long been constrained, for those who have long been facing abject political conditions. I would like to share with you a text I received on Wednesday, November 6th, first thing in the morning at 6 o’clock. I was not awake yet, but this was the day the Associated Press declared the presidency and most of the Senate and Congress races. My colleague and comrade at Towson University, Nicole Fabricant—an author, anthropologist, and activist—sent this. Part of what she wrote was:

“While we wake up with heavy hearts this morning, what this means for climate and environment—we will rise. We are going to fight like hell for working people, for Black, Native, and Latinx, for those living in sacrifice zones, for those who are poor and hungry. Either way, we fight. And while it is devastating to face the next four years with House and Senate majority, our bold and radical movements are strong, and we will take to the streets. We will fight for the world we want to live in. We will build communities and collectives. The stakes are high, the risk is great, but I am ready to stand in community with Baltimore.”

That was the most wonderful text I could have woken up to on that morning, because it completely reoriented my perspective on the news that day. I was already working and teaching with Brother Eric Jackson of the Black Yield Institute, and most of what I will share today I must credit to the political education I have received at the Sankara Hamer Academy with Black Yield Institute.

Looking to those who have been working through these strategies for far longer—outside of governmental regimes, outside of the constraints of government—there is so much movement work that has already been done. It is work we can look to, be inspired by, and, quite frankly, that we should be joining in solidarity rather than creating parallel efforts. These movements are already building exactly the kinds of channels we are trying to envision.

Within the academy, I believe we need to embrace interdisciplinarity. We must look beyond silos and think about how colleagues in other places, whom we are not typically talking to, can bring expertise, lived experience, and shared knowledge. In doing so, we can develop new channels and pathways for thinking—again, in concert with those who have long been asking these questions and are already operating outside of governmental channels.

In terms of modes of resistance, I believe there are humanistic interventions to be considered. There is art, poetry, theater, film—ways that allow us to feel unconstrained by the narrow, reactionary realm of politics. The human spirit of creativity has always been alive, and politicians cannot constrain that. That is a real space of liberation. We should also be looking to community programs—building food pantries, supporting grassroots political education, and doing work on the ground that does not rely on government funding but instead depends on collective, community-driven effort. We saw this clearly during the COVID pandemic, when food became scarce in neighborhoods affected by food apartheid, and community members rallied to create food procurement and distribution spaces.

Finally, when I think about building solidarity across movements, I believe it means expanding our notion of expertise—of what it means to know, or to be an expert in a given area. More productive conversations happen when we open the doors to those who are not typically included in idea generation or knowledge-building. We must bring diverse actors together and identify central themes that unite people, especially around ecological imagination. How might certain sites of ecological degradation, or sacrifice zones, bring together unexpected allies and partners? By expanding our definitions of expertise and experience, we can build new coalitions around ecological thematics that look both to the past and to the future.

We had a panel yesterday at the Sustainability Leadership Council here at Hopkins on Environmental Humanities, where the idea of truly situated ecological knowledge came up. If you are sitting along a stream bed, what does it take to imagine what it looked like 20 years ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago—or 200,000 years ago? What might it look like in 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, or even 200,000 years in the future? That expansive temporal imagination for place can be productive when we collaborate on shaping those futures, and do so without hubris.

It requires us to let go of ego and loosen disciplinary boundaries and professional standards—some of which may be arbitrary but still held dear. If we can expand our definitions of expertise and knowledge in that way, we can begin to truly reimagine and rebuild together.

Jessie Croteau: No, that was wonderful. Thank you so much, Nicole. All right, PJ?

PJ Brendese: Thanks, Jessie, for inviting me. I am really excited to be part of the EDC. That kind of “stay in your own lane” parochial division of labor that happens in the academy—it is so nice to be in a space where you can think about shared concerns among people who would not otherwise have occasion to be together, thinking about them, because they are siloed. Since one of the questions Jessie asked us to reflect on was how we build solidarities across movements, geographies, and traditions in order to sustain environmental justice work, I thought I would say a few words about this in terms of environmental racism, which is often categorized as a subset of environmental justice.

While I think there is no silver bullet or soundbite to fully answer Jessie’s very good questions, my own thinking has been around environmental racism not just as situating people of color in proximity to waste, but as the production of certain populations as waste—rendered available to be wasted. This includes not just people from what Donald Trump called “shithole countries,” or places like Puerto Rico, where residents are derided as being from a floating island of trash and therefore available to be trashed, but also so-called “white trash” and those liminal whites who fear falling into the dustbin of humanity.

This, of course, requires treating whiteness as race, instead of as the absence of race—and “white trash” as race. I wonder what it might take to cultivate solidarities and receptivity to those liminal whites who are so often overlooked by the left, but who are worried about being sucked into the category of people who, as Tucker Carlson put it regarding immigrants, are making America “poorer, dirtier, and more divided.” He makes this argument by famously juxtaposing pictures of migrants against trash.

In short, there is an established political strategy—on both the left and the right—of blaming racial others for environmental destruction. I am not trying to draw a false equivalence, but I do think that, especially now as a time for introspection, it is important to note that on the left, it has become fast or fashionable to refer to humans as a virus on the planet. That is concerning, especially when we consider the long and dangerous history of coding certain populations as disease.

We might ask: who historically has been personified as diseases, or as vectors of contagion? Who, exactly, would the planet be better off without? When some left advocates argue for population control, one must ask: what populations have historically been most available to have their populations controlled?

We do not need a long memory to see who has been coded as non-white, invasive species—those “threatening to spread like a virus.” There is a long history to this kind of logic. In Greek mythology, for instance, only “real Athenians” came from the land. What does that mean for the rest of us?

In terms of the logic of control, maybe environmental racism also includes the discursive work done by environmental metaphors like “brown tide rising,” or people referred to as a “deluge” or an “infestation.” I do not think this is merely a rhetorical slip. These are sites of race-making, where political subjects are produced through a kind of racial common sense—what goes without saying because it comes without saying.

These are metaphors, but metaphor literally means “to carry over.” Power is not innocent in the racialized political imaginaries these metaphors produce. So perhaps thinking solidaristically also means thinking about eco-fascism not just as a phenomenon confined to the right-wing fringe—such as the Christchurch shooter—but also in terms of eco-fascist logics of power. These logics have become increasingly mainstream, even if they are not yet widely legible as part of the broader fascist movement we are currently suffering through.

I will leave it there.

Jessie Croteau: Thank you so much PJ. Anand, would you like to go next?

Anand Pandian: Thank you, PJ. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you, Samia. Thank you, Sam, for being here. And thank you, Jessie, for orchestrating this conversation. It is such a challenging time, and it is one of those times where the company we can count on really does matter. The fact that we have all of us together in this room—and virtually, all of you out there—I think it means a great deal in terms of thinking through how to work effectively through a time of such intense division, and what it would mean to build solidarity of a different form, as your questions invited us to consider.

I am an anthropologist, and this is a question I have been wrestling with here in the United States since the 2016 election, when I decided to begin doing ethnographic fieldwork in this country—trying to make sense of the appeal of a politics rooted in xenophobia and wall-building. I have sought to understand where that appeal comes from, and what it would mean to try to reorganize our society instead around a greater commitment to collective solidarity and mutual caretaking.

As it happens, the book that emerged from that project is coming out next month. This morning, after dropping my kids off at school, I came home to find a big box waiting—my advance copies of the book. The book is called Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down. As I thought about what to share in the context of this conversation, I realized that the last couple pages of the book’s preface—which I wrote after the 2024 election—speak directly to what we are discussing here. So I thought I would read those pages. I do so not only to share this moment with you, but also out of a commitment to storytelling, to conversation, and to other forms of dialogue that might help us break through some of the impasses we have been discussing.

The preface begins with a scene of conversation with a retired factory worker on a park bench in a small town in southern Michigan. I was in that town visiting someone else—a small businessman I had met at a libertarian conference in Las Vegas in the summer of 2017. I call him Frank in the book. I write about the avid discussions and debates we kept up over the years until our relationship ultimately collapsed after the 2020 presidential election.

Frank even visited me in Baltimore. We spent an afternoon walking around the Johns Hopkins campus. He expressed a strong sense that conservative voices and writers were routinely suppressed and censored in academic spaces like mine. I tried to push back, offering examples of recent events and referencing a copy of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments that happened to be on my desk. But we went in circles, unable to agree even on the most basic facts.

Later that afternoon, the topic of immigration came up as we sat on my front porch. Frank leaned over and rapped his knuckles on my front door: “This is your house,” he said. “How many people do you want in here?” I have thought about that question for years. Like many others I met during my research, Frank imagined the nation’s borders in very personal, everyday terms. To him, our safety and well-being depended on drawing stark lines between those who are inside and those who are outside.

But I could not help thinking about all the spaces that are neither fully in nor out—like the porch we sat on, watching others pass by on the sidewalk. That space, and others like it, sustain the possibility of a more inclusive practice of community.

I experienced something similar just days after the 2024 election. Tired from staying up late watching returns, I went outside to discover I had left a light on in our car overnight. The battery was dead. My wife and I were scrambling, our kids were going to be late for school, and we were not sure what to do. At that moment, a neighbor walking up the street asked, “Do you need a jump?” We gratefully accepted. We recognized each other vaguely, but had never talked before.

The more I thought about it, the more meaningful that moment seemed. Our neighbor heard us talking, identified a problem, and stopped to help. None of that would have happened if he had been wearing headphones, driving instead of walking, or had simply chosen not to stop. What mattered was that there was space to share, a moment of awareness, and an inclination to act. We need to ensure that such gestures have a place in daily life.

Whether it is everyday challenges like dead batteries or lost keys, or larger crises like the hurricanes that struck the southeastern U.S. just before the 2024 election, the willingness to take on the travails of others can transform personal and collective life. As organizers Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix have written, “Solidarity weaves us into a larger and more resilient ‘we’ through the precious and powerful sense that even though we are different, our lives and fates are connected.”

We must pay more attention to the circumstances that foster this kind of solidarity and ensure its expression in open and inclusive ways. Much of the activism and organizing after the 2016 election and the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from this conviction, which is even more urgent now. These aspirations will face serious tests in the years ahead. How will people respond to the deportation of neighbors, the dismantling of environmental protections, the banning of books that matter deeply to marginalized communities, or the spread of media that glorifies masculine aggression and disregards the struggles of others?

In the book, I argue that the everyday infrastructures of defense and retreat—our homes, our highways, our mental habits—often prevent us from giving such concerns the attention they deserve. These everyday walls train us to think of safety in antagonistic, individualistic ways. But the spaces we inhabit can be reimagined to support collective caretaking, as those organizing for justice have already shown.

Xenophobic and authoritarian politics derive strength from the fear of strangers, and the belief that threats are already among us and must be rooted out. But as Toni Morrison observed, such fears often reflect a deeper discomfort with our own foreignness—our own disintegrating sense of belonging. The true danger may lie less with the strangers among us than with the strangeness within, and the alienation we carry.

So much depends on the edges—those boundaries between the familiar and the foreign. Can we once again see these edges not as barriers but as sites of encounter? It is daunting to imagine making a shared life in public, in pursuit of well-being on a suffering planet. But even a conversation with someone different from ourselves may hold that promise. We need to find our way back to the communion that can bind us to those beyond our bounds. We need to rekindle that open spirit of kinship once again.

So that is how the preface ends. I want to thank you for your indulgence in listening, and for your willingness to share this moment with me. It is the first day I have held this book in my hands, and I am deeply grateful for your company.

Jessie Croteau: Thank you so much. I’m so glad we got to share that with you. Sam, I invite you to speak now.

Sam Myers: Thank you to all of you for inviting me. I definitely feel a bit like a fish out of water, coming from a very different disciplinary background. You social scientists use words like paintbrushes—it is really beautiful to listen to you all speak.

My background is in internal medicine. I trained as an internist, and then became a sort of confused internist who grew deeply interested in how global environmental change is becoming the primary driver of the increasing global burden of disease. The extent to which the Earth crisis is now driving a global health and humanitarian crisis has shaped my career. Along the way, that area of concern came to be known as planetary health, and I have been engaged in that field in different ways throughout my career.

When I was invited to this conversation, I started by trying to figure out what “ecological imaginaries” meant. I decided that maybe it refers to an aspirational vision of the future as it relates to environmental and ecological concerns. That is what I have been holding in my head, anyway.

I love that concept, because I think it is at the core of planetary health—defining what I call a “bright future.” Where are we, as a community, trying to go? And how do we describe that destination clearly enough that it becomes a shared vision? I think the environmental community has done a really poor job of being aspirational. Instead, we have been largely apocalyptic and catastrophic in the messages we send. So that is the starting point for me.

A couple of thoughts. First: we are slipping into authoritarianismfascism with permission. That permission is significant. Depending on how you measure it, somewhere close to half the country still approves of the job being done by the current administrationwhat the Trump administration represented. That reality cannot be ignored. Where we are heading is happening with consent.

Second: the fact that certain beliefs and values are deeply held does not necessarily make them right. To return to something PJ said, I have felt this firsthand. I spent two years working in Tibet, and two more working with Conservation International and USAID in tropical communities. I came to recognize that my values—of protecting natural systems—were elitist values. They are luxury values. These are the values one can embrace after one’s children are fed.

To be upset with people for not embracing them reflects a kind of elitism that we must examine. Just because I believe in these values with a fervor I will carry to my grave does not make them right. And it certainly does not make them any less rooted in a place of privilege.

Because of these two realities, I have been thinking more about what all of you have said—about kinship, about building community, about constructing bridges. The real question is: how do we bridge that divide?

We have done a terrible job of explaining why these are not luxury values. We have failed to communicate that these values are essential to the kind of future we all want. Not just for already marginalized communities—which, Nicole, I appreciate you highlighting—but also for people like Frank. That is, in fact, where the field of planetary health came from. It seeks to stop separating the conversation about the Earth crisis from the future of our kids and grandkids.

We need to recognize that what have historically been separate environmental issues—climate, biodiversity, desertification, oceans—all with their own conferences, ministries, and NGOs—have now morphed into one enormous conversation about human survival and social justice. We need to make it unmistakably clear that if we continue to degrade the natural systems that sustain life, we will not have a livable future. Period. That truth is essential. We are doing a bad job communicating it, especially to a large portion of the country, and we need to improve.

The image of humans as a virus—that has been around the environmental community forever. The population control conversation, in particular, is a massive problem. We must center people in our conversations—care for people—and that means rethinking how we communicate environmental urgency.

At the Institute, we are asking how to do that better. One promising approach involves clinicians. Nurses and physicians are among the most trusted messengers in the country—nurses have topped that list for 18 years, followed closely by physicians and first responders. How can we help them convey this message more effectively?

How can we use moments like the Los Angeles fires or Asheville floods as opportunities to communicate: this is what happens when we destabilize natural systems—it puts all of us at risk. The health angle is crucial. The financial angle is also powerful. A recent story in The New York Times noted that two-thirds of the average American family’s wealth is in their home. After decades of increasing home values, those values are now declining—largely because homes are becoming uninsurable. That destabilization is costing people money—real money—and threatening their financial security.

So I think we need to acknowledge that much of what we are seeing is a reaction to a kind of intellectual elitism. That elitism can seep into our values and even our logic. We need to reframe environmental care as the bedrock of caring for people—not only the most marginalized, but everyone on this planet.

That is how we begin to bridge the communication divide that all of you have been talking about.

Jessie Croteau: Thank you so much to all of you. This has been incredibly interesting with some powerful provocations. I want to thank you again for being here and for thinking-with my questions, but I would now like to expand it to the wider group.

Who would like to ask a question?

Gabrielle Robbins: Thank you for this. I think I have one question that may actually be a multi-part question, and it is broadly about the challenge of bridging the divide.

First, in response to what you said, Sam, about messaging and connecting with people: I did my graduate work at MIT, and I remember there being a consistent sense among some in the tech elite that we just need to give up on Earth entirely. The planet is already so irreversibly damaged that our only option is to look to the final frontier. I remember one engineer in particular who seriously said, “Mars is the future,” and that we should turn Earth into a national park—essentially a preserved relic—for the benefit of whatever Martian civilization might exist.

So I have a clear sense that in certain business and tech circles, there is a real belief that the problems here are not worth solving. There is not even a basic agreement about the value of sustaining this planet. My question is: what do you do when you are confronted with technological or business decision-makers who simply do not believe in the value of a shared planet to begin with?

Then, on the other side of the spectrum, I have also worked with small-scale gold miners in Northern California. These are not people who would typically say that climate change is real, but they do have a deep care for their local environment. These are people who, while gold mining, were using turkey basters to remove mercury from streams—because they cared about the health of those streams. That ethic of care was real, even if we might not conventionally describe them as moral or ecological actors.

So my second question is: how do you make sense of those kinds of contradictions? How do you bridge messaging divides when people care deeply at one scale but not at another—when care for the local does not translate into care for the global, or vice versa?

Sam Myers: Thank you. On the first part of your question—about the tech elite who essentially believe the Earth is a lost cause and we should focus on Mars—I honestly think you ignore people like that. I do. Because you are talking about a tiny fraction of the population, maybe 0.0001%, who hold that perspective.

I do not know whether that mindset comes from ignorance, ideology, or some weird combination of both. But even in our worst possible scenarios, Earth will never have as little potential for life as Mars. That kind of thinking just does not make any sense. Yes, there are pervasive views out there—like denying that climate change is real—which we do have to engage with. But I do not think this is one of those views. It is not pervasive.

Most people, I believe, do care about their natural environments in some way. They may use different language for it, but that care exists. So honestly, I do not think it is worth elevating that kind of perspective into something to be addressed seriously. It is not worth our energy because it comes from such a small slice of the population—granted, a slice with major access to resources, including some of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

So then the question becomes: how do you confront someone like that? Someone who holds immense economic and technological power, like Elon Musk, for example? Do you believe he actually believes that Earth is expendable? That is a whole other question. And it is hard to say how sincere or performative those beliefs might be.

It gets tricky. So much of it comes down to ideology—whether it is something deeply internalized or something strategically vocalized for political or economic gain.

Anand Pandian: I want to be careful about jumping too quickly to the idea that a position is so outlandish it cannot be believed. I feel that we are learning again and again that too many people are too invested in things that are difficult to believe. And I think we need to do our homework. When I say “we,” I mean those of us with the luxury of studying and reflecting—we need to spend time trying to understand how ideas that are so far from compelling can nonetheless become so compelling.

And actually, given that this conversation is taking place under the umbrella of the Ecological Design Collective, I would be inclined to approach this not only as a moral or ideological issue, but as a design problem. Rather than asking whether people have the “right” ideas, or evaluating whether they care enough or have the correct sense of sympathy or compassion, I think we need to ask: what is it about the conditions of everyday life that make it so easy to draw hard lines? What has made it so easy to exclude everything outside the narrow zone we consider our own, to say, “I will protect this space, and to hell with the rest”?

Gabrielle, I hear both parts of your question speaking to this issue—the radicalization of a divide between the space one cares about and the world beyond. That is the deeper concern: the deep entrenchment of that division. I think we really need to ask how it got to be this way. And from there, we need to ask what it would mean to work toward other frameworks for collective life—frameworks in which such firm and exclusionary boundaries cannot be so easily drawn.

PJ Brendese: I just want to weigh in on that, too. I think when we talk about the urge to colonize, it is not only the tech elite driving that impulse. Stephen Hawking, for example, once said that we will eventually be able to colonize another planet, but that we should deal with our environmental problems here first—because we do not yet have the technology to leave. But even in that statement, what goes unquestioned is the presumption that colonization is the eventual solution.

Some scholars might refer to this as a kind of psycho-affective attachment to colonialism—a deep, often unacknowledged way of thinking that persists in how we imagine the future. And I do not separate that from your example, Gabrielle, of the miners who care for the local ecosystem but still operate under the logic that someone else will be the buffer zone for climate change.

There is often a tacit presumption—perhaps unthought in some circles—that people in the Global South will absorb the brunt of environmental harm. That they are “the not yet,” and that the last shall be first. I tend to think of all of these things together, because they reveal a larger problematic: the gravitational pull of colonial legacy, especially among those of us with privilege.

That legacy reinforces the belief that someone else will buy us time, that someone else will act as the measure of humanity, or the sacrificial zone, insulating us from the destruction in which we ourselves are implicated.

Noah Kulick: I just want to add something related, because it connects to this idea that we will be able to build the technology we need tomorrow. There is another kind of techno-optimist mindset—one that assumes technology can solve everything, so we do not really need to change our values. That is something I have been thinking about a lot.

Historically, for example, in the 1980s, environmentalism began to split along these lines. One part of the mainstream environmental movement started to shift its language toward a more neoliberal, pro-growth, capitalist framework—trying to work within those structures, using their language and tools. Meanwhile, another group said, “No, we need to go to the grassroots and really think about how we change culture—and how we transform capitalism itself.”

So I guess my question is: as we consider our current moment, as we talk about capitalism and environmental values, what does it mean to focus on changing values now? What approach are we taking—working within the system, or trying to reimagine it entirely?

Samia Kirchner: I just wanted to bring in my perspective on this very, very good question. And again, I have to include a disclaimer: I am in a very good mood today. I do not want to ruin that mood by talking about Elon Musk or all the bad things that are happening. At this point, I honestly do not care about those things anymore. What I care about is being very intentional and cognizant of my own circle of influence—creating a vertically integrated life around myself with people who are like-minded, yet bring different perspectives.

That is why I go outside the domain of my own discipline. Because true transdisciplinarity is, in my view, the only way to decolonize knowledge. The scientific knowledge we have inherited—post-European Enlightenment science—has done a lot of good, but it has also caused a lot of harm. I am currently in a space where I am trying to ask: within my own discipline, within my domain of the built environment that is ecologically grounded, how can I “throw out the bathwater but keep the baby”? What is the “baby” in the science that we still need? And what are the aspects of that Enlightenment legacy we can just discard completely—the bathwater?

That is the critical space I am inhabiting. I am not interested in trying to figure out why people vote against their own interests. I know there are people who are doing good work in that area, and there is merit in it. But personally, that is not where I want to focus right now. I want to focus on what I can do in the few decades I have left, Inshallah, to plant seeds—because every seed has the potential to produce 3,000 more.

That is the space I am in. A space of abundance. A space where change is possible—provided we stay focused, intentional, and committed to planting seeds that will multiply. Because then, ecologically and inevitably, change will come.

Nicole Labruto: I would like to add my thoughts as well. Gabrielle, your question is incredibly provocative and important. And Noah, I think your point is also really significant. This idea—that capitalism creates a divide between perceptions of marginalized Black populations and white marginalized populations—has been examined for well over a century. There is a racial divide, yes, but it is also an artificial one, especially in the context of class togetherness.

I do not think we should avoid speaking with the white working class. We absolutely need to be in conversation. And in the spirit of thinking about this as a design challenge, we might take inspiration from the nonhuman world—thinking about how it models coalescence and community. A great example comes from Gabrielle’s story about miners using turkey basters to extract mercury from streams. That is a form of citizen science, by another name. And what is it about mercury—this toxic element—that brings people together?

Dr. Nicole Fabricant has worked with Appalachian communities and residents of sacrifice zones in South Baltimore. What unites them is coal. Coal, as a material object—organic, mined from the Earth—is also a toxin, a labor regime, and a site of environmental devastation. It has destroyed landscapes in both regions, albeit differently. But it has become a shared object of political action and ecological concern.

So we can ask: who cares about mercury? Who cares about coal? What other materials or environmental factors can serve as boundary objects—things that exist outside of us but are embedded in our social relations—and that could serve as points of shared concern? In terms of design thinking, it is interesting to think about what relationalities exist within the ecology itself—what elements of the natural world can draw people together. This is one way we might begin to bridge divides between Black and white marginalized communities. Their experiences are different, yes, but they are not beyond dialogue, not beyond working together toward shared goals.

Anand Pandian: If I could just jump in—I think what your community has done, Sam, by centering on the planetary, is really powerful. That planetary scale provides a common matrix—a way to bring people together around issues like health, which you have emphasized. But I also think it is important to consider slightly less expansive scales. Systems like watersheds, for example, also put people into proximity with one another—often in ways we do not pay attention to. In cities, we bury our streams and rivers; we pretend they are not there. But they are there, and they connect us. Floods and other events constantly remind us of this.

As early as the late 19th century, John Wesley Powell proposed the idea of “watershed democracy”—the notion that political boundaries in the United States could be drawn around watershed regions rather than arbitrary grid lines. That idea never took off, but it remains a powerful resource for thinking about how to organize shared life.

I think this speaks not only to the kinds of commitments the Planetary Health Institute has taken up, but also to how we might institutionalize new forms of shared existence. And something Sam said earlier really sticks with me: we do not all need to be “right” in the conversation. Not everyone will share the same beliefs. But if you can coalesce enough shared intention—enough alignment to hold things together for movement-building or collective change—then that is enough. There just has to be enough to enable us to work together.

Sam Myers: Just one quick additional reflection, Gabrielle, on what you were saying. I think if you take that perspective—the one that assumes the planet is beyond saving—it really makes me angry. Those statements are so ignorant, and to me they feel like a desecration of something that is still beautiful and whole.

But perhaps that is part of the point. It goes back to what I was saying earlier: the environmental movement has done a really poor job of communicating hope. Every time someone like James Hansen says, “game over for the planet,” or every time we speak of irreversible tipping points, or planetary boundaries that we have already exceeded, we are reinforcing the message that this planet is no longer inhabitable. In some ways, that message is our own doing.

So the question becomes: how do we change the narrative? How do we emphasize that we still live on a beautiful, healthy, vibrant planet—one that is beginning to strain under the weight of our ecological footprint, yes—but one that still holds incredible promise? We have decades in which we could transform how we live, to bring ourselves back into balance with the life support systems that sustain us. And if we succeed, we could be looking at the most promising moment for humanity in all of our history.

If you look at metrics of human development—gender equality, racial equality, education, health—the world could be a tremendously exciting place in a hundred years. But only if we navigate this moment with intention. Unfortunately, we have done a very poor job of communicating that possibility. And in that vacuum, the more cynical and defeatist narratives gain oxygen and traction.

Jessie Croteau: I think that this is the perfect place for us to end, because we’re already up against the hour! Thank you so much everyone for this thought-provoking and powerful conversation.