Lena Greenberg: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Polyculture Podcast. Laina and Gabriel here. If you’re tuning in for the first time, thanks for joining us. I’m Laina Greenberg. I use they, them pronouns. I’m a writer and organizer based in Burlington, Vermont in the U. S. And
Gabriel Coleman: I’m Gabriel Coleman. I also use they, them pronouns and I’m a historian, musician, and artist based in Dublin, Ireland.
It’s been a while and we’ve done some rethinking about what this podcast can be and what it should be instead of doing the kind of two part. thing that we’ve done before where we bring in some academic stuff and we talk about it, and then in the second half we talk about pop culture. We’re gonna try in this [00:01:00] episode and future episodes to have one of us teach the other about something that they know a lot about or interested in about and have a more open conversation that can mix the two of them and is not so heavily invested in texts.
Thanks for coming along with the ride and we’re happy to be back.
Lena Greenberg: We live embedded inside of so many systems. Among them our political system, which in the U. S. relies on lots of other power structures and the electoral college and a whole smattering of things that don’t make a ton of sense. Our popular culture and our movement culture, the social change efforts that happen outside of the official government, are a sort of popular culture that are interacting with.
The way that those systems of power work. So today we’re going to [00:02:00] talk about a campaign. I just wrapped up in Burlington, Vermont for city council.
Gabriel Coleman: So Lena as a organizer, as a farmer, as a person who’s done so many different things and made your mark on the world in so many ways as a podcaster, what made you decide that You wanted to engage in electoral politics and pursue your own candidacy in Burlington.
Lena Greenberg: Well, there were a couple of things that factored into my decision. One was that Burlington, which is a pretty small city or a big town, depending on who you ask, has a council of 12 people. We have eight wards, and then each of the wards is in a paired up district. Um, so we have four districts, and so each person in Burlington has two representatives, and each of the ward representatives was up for election in this last election cycle, along with an open mayoral seat, which has not happened in 12 years.
So, [00:03:00] big election, the councillor who is running in the ward where I live, has was running unopposed, we cannot have a strong democracy and a strong showing in an election without a contest. And of course the mayoral race was still happening here, but the idea that somebody who has voted both will end poorly in the past, can run again without really having any questions asked of them, didn’t sit right with me.
Um, and I, I kept saying on the campaign, like, an, an unchallenged election is an unquestioned one. election, and this councillor, candidate, at the time would not have talked about all the things we talked about if I had not also been in the race. So, part of my reasoning was, let me open up this race and see what we can get into the public consciousness here.
Um, and then the other piece was, it’s life’s work for all of us, I think, to find [00:04:00] our place in the movement, and I have long been curious about city government and governance and kind of practicing dismantling the system so we can build a new one. I’ve done that in many other ways, usually from the outside, and I thought, okay, let me see what it feels like to put my hat in the ring for the inside and see if it sits well with me.
Maybe this will become something I enjoy doing and, and part of my theory of change. Maybe this is not how I want to spend my energy, but I should try and I learned a huge amount from just the process of of running and needing to answer A diversity of questions about how the city works and how I would behave in this situation or that situation campaigning is like a very very long job interview where you have to be incredibly strategic and also Public facing and you know up for scrutiny every moment, especially if you’re in a small town over the course of the campaign I talked to hundreds of [00:05:00] people And had a a really good excuse to invite myself into those conversations Which I would not have had if I had not chosen to run
Gabriel Coleman: Uh, we should also say Lena did not win their election, but It’s true.
The point was to open this conversation, and it seems like that was really, really successful. So previous to this, and currently still, right, you’re on your NPA, your Neighborhood
Lena Greenberg: Neighborhood Planning Assembly, yeah.
Gabriel Coleman: Planning Assembly, which is unique to Burlington or to Vermont?
Lena Greenberg: To Burlington, yeah. There’s a long history of public engagement in Vermont and in Burlington.
An annual meeting called Town Meeting and in most of the state people get together and actually have a meeting and talk about issues and then If they can get there, they’ll vote on the issues. Burlington is a little too big for a traditional town meeting So we have an election on town meeting day, which is the first Tuesday in March.[00:06:00]
Town meeting day predates Vermont’s statehood. It’s been happening for an incredibly long time. The neighborhood planning assemblies are different, but related to this culture of engagement, which is possible at the small scale that our population puts us at. And there are monthly meetings either in every ward or every pair of wards across the city.
They’re somewhat financially supported by the city, and the meetings are run by an elected group of volunteers who make up the steering committee. That’s how I serve at the NPA. And there’s an election every year. Anyone is welcome to run as long as you live in the ward. And your job on the steering committee is to set the agenda and kind of hold the space for people to come and learn about what’s going on in terms of development, or a new project, or hear from your neighbors.
And the, the NPAs vary in, in scope from basically being a receptacle for city agencies to, you know, say, ah, yes, we got community input to being a wonderful [00:07:00] community meal where people come together and meet neighbors they’ve never met before and talk openly about issues they. Sometimes divide us, but could bring us together if we took the time to figure out how to manage that.
I’m so glad that you got to come to one when you were here in November. It’s a little slice of how we have options for community engagement in Burlington, which is so special, and also that The NPAs are not very well attended a lot of the time, and there’s room for work to be done there to get people more engaged and more organized outside of the traditional kind of flow of election cycles.
Yeah,
Gabriel Coleman: it was really cool, especially the one that we went to. Now Mayor Emma came and spoke and took some questions from folks. So it was fun to be across the ocean in Ireland, but still have this engagement, not only with you, but also with Emma having met her and now to say, yes, I’ve met the mayor of Burlington.
It’s kind of cute. Yeah. Vermont and Burlington seem to have a really [00:08:00] interesting focus on the local in terms of politics. And I know, as you’re alluding to with the NPAs, people get what they ask for from these systems. Not everyone is as involved in the local minutiae of Burlington politics as you are, but it seems like there are so many avenues for people to get involved.
Having come from New York, which has city councils and community boards and all this stuff, what Has been in your experience of the politics in the two places that you’ve lived locally.
Lena Greenberg: I loved living in New York City and I could not stay there because it felt like I was just shouting into the void all the time.
And there’s plenty to take issue with in New York City. And it’s very possible that you know, had I decided to stick it out after my neighborhood was destroyed by development and, you know, all everybody else in my age group was a gentrifier from a suburb of another city. Sorry. Um, I, I maybe would have [00:09:00] found my place there, but I, I couldn’t see a way forward in New York City politics that made me feel like it would matter that I was there, and I just Couldn’t take it.
Not to mention the, the unaffordability of the city and, and the kind of emotional and cultural impact of, of the gentrification that happened over the course of my, my life there. Living in Burlington, it feels like it matters that all of us are here who are engaged and we have kind of a mandate to grow.
The number of people who regularly show up to council meetings and, you know, important issues to broader awareness and get people organized in fighting for this or against that. I love how much it feels like we can change things in Burlington. At the same time, there’s a kind of staticness to the big town feeling.
It takes a lot to change people and to [00:10:00] change communities and cultures. Burlington hasn’t built housing in 50 years. So, even though people have been moving to Chittenden County, where we’re located, They’ve been moving to what has now become tremendous sprawl across the county. So instead of experiencing the kind of urban growth that so often brings political energy and young people and People who are trying to be a part of that change.
We’ve just been sending people to the sprawl or for lower income and more working class folks. You can’t live here. There’s nowhere to live. It’s really expensive and that’s harmed our growth both economically and politically as a city. So. As much as it feels possible to change things in Burlington, we are in a kind of interesting spot of either choosing to embrace growth and density and really become the city that we need to be, especially in this era of climate disaster and climate transformation, and [00:11:00] It’s yet unclear if we will do that because of the kind of small town feeling and desire for Burlington to keep feeling like a small town.
Gabriel Coleman: As far as the politics of the small town stuff, you talked about how you like the feeling that you can change things and that just by being yourself and going to the, the MPAs and being involved, you can make an impact. Are there downsides to that kind of smallness, do you think? Or what would you change?
Lena Greenberg: One of the best things about New York City is that we Have all of these opportunities to be in physical space with people who are not like us Obviously there is a robust history of segregation in this country And that has an impact on urban form in new york city and burlington alike that said We don’t have a subway you can get on and share space with someone who is from a different part of the world than you, is speaking a different language, and is having a totally different experience of being in basically exactly the same place as you.
Burlington is becoming more diverse. [00:12:00] Many, many of the people who make our community diverse are refugees from other countries, which is a really different kind of diversity than New York diversity, which is people from all over the world and people who also identify as New Yorkers, who have different racial and class and religious identities.
So there’s a lot of change happening in terms of who our community is right now and I want to see long time Burlingtonians, and long time Vermonters everywhere in the state, welcome that change instead of maintaining this beautiful landscape with green rolling hills is just for white people who can get here.
First of all, there’s very little public transit to get here in the first place, and that, you know, that’s on purpose. And people who do not have money to purchase land, which is one of the few ways to sustainably live here, there’s a really deep rooted history of Racism and exclusionary policy, especially around land, that impacts the way Vermont is [00:13:00] today, and filters into Burlington and Burlington politics and, and thinking, whether we, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
Gabriel Coleman: Yeah, yeah, and it seems like a lot of the liberal quasi lefty attitude that places like Burlington have, and this is the same in the place where I grew up in Minnesota, like, it masks a lot of those things. And masks the systemicness, like in New York. You’re poignantly aware of the systemic oppression within the fabric of the city.
Lena Greenberg: Right.
Gabriel Coleman: Because I think you have to deal with just infrastructure all the time. And in places where people are a little more atomized and that are a bit smaller, those systems, if you can have your own home and you can have your own car.
Lena Greenberg: Then you
Gabriel Coleman: can opt out of feeling like you’re a part of a system.
Lena Greenberg: Right. You’re suddenly insulated from all of the feelings and experiences that pull us together through the systems we share, whether that’s transportation or housing or otherwise. And we could talk about this all day, right, the connection between holding private property and the sense of [00:14:00] entitlement and the idea of individualism all bringing us to the political landscape we have now, as opposed to one in which we see each other as a whole.
our collective responsibility and make very different decisions as a result of that.
Gabriel Coleman: One of the things I’m really curious about is what it’s like to be a climate candidate. What is it like to actually run on an actually progressive climate platform?
Lena Greenberg: We have a couple of big climate problems in Vermont and also in Burlington.
At the Burlington scale, we, as a city, own and operate not just an international airport but also the McNeil Generating Station, which is a 40 ish year old biomass facility that uses trees from Vermont and also from New York, and There’s a lot of greenwashing tied up in the idea of McNeil, and there’s not a lot of transparency about the sourcing of the wood, and we don’t count emissions from [00:15:00] McNeil, because, you know, trees grow back, is the wild logic we’re offered.
So, running as a climate candidate here means that I was, and will continue to talk about McNeil and the airport as our two largest sources of emissions, which we just don’t count in our climate plan. Our climate plan also is a net zero plan, so The idea was to talk specifically about getting off of fossil fuels, but we use wood as a combustible fuel, which cranks out emissions and is still problematic.
And we know that net zero is a concept invented and peddled by the fossil fuel industry for exactly the reason that it’s present in our plan now, which is that it kind of allows us off the hook as a city and allows our biggest polluters off the hook to continue polluting. As long as they’re offsetting in a way, which we know is usually not viable or real and regardless, regardless, doesn’t.
Demand the kind of system change that we would see if we said we’re getting off all combustible fuel now So [00:16:00] inside of that context i’ve had a bunch of conversations with people who are like well McNeil’s better than fossil fuels which you know depends on who you ask and depends on what the truth is about the sourcing Beyond the scope of all of that Is the fact that we are far too late And we should not be in such a tough position, but we are so behind.
We are not going to meet any of our climate targets, basically no matter what we do. And we’re not doing anywhere close to everything we can be. And so, as a climate candidate, and also as a climate organizer, always, right? There’s this work of saying, we need to do everything we can right now, and it’s not going to be enough.
Both of those things are true. And it’s all the more reason to have strong climate policy at the local, state, and national levels, while also holding that there will be disaster. We will continue to see catastrophic flooding in Vermont, as we did in July and December, and there’s more flooding around the corner.
And [00:17:00] there is plenty of reason to believe That our state will see untold numbers of climate refugees and migrants coming here to a state where we haven’t built enough housing, our infrastructure, whether it’s roads or stormwater or otherwise, is really not able to handle a huge population spike, and culturally, we’re not in a place where we’re Ready to welcome people who are not from here.
So that’s some context. Being a climate candidate means that I’m constantly saying we have to do everything we can and we were put in this impossible position by a handful of corporations that knew exactly what was gonna happen if we denied that there was a connection between combusting fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect and the balance of our Earth systems.
It’s tough.
Gabriel Coleman: It’s really tough. Right. I’m very curious about this because I think what people expect from [00:18:00] politicians in terms of climate and environmental conversation in the U. S. and in Ireland as well, um, is like this trust the system trust the process incremental change kind of thing.
Lena Greenberg: Yeah.
Gabriel Coleman: And they want their politician that they’re voting for to tell them that it’s going to be okay.
Lena Greenberg: Right.
Gabriel Coleman: And so I’m wondering what has it been like to talk to people When you’re canvassing or at a debate or just in your interactions and to bring this sense of urgency and, and I guess a sense of the systems we live under and in part the system that I’m running to be a part of is broken or has been incapable of making the change that we need.
How do people react to you? What have you learned from doing this?
Lena Greenberg: The way you win votes is by making people feel good. Which makes it exceptionally challenging to talk about climate. [00:19:00] Because when we’re honest about climate, nobody feels good. So that’s that’s kind of the the first and last undeniable truth of Doing something like running for office where you have to put forward this hopeful vision while also knowing That the scene is a bad one for us humans here on this planet.
That said, there are so many actionable things we could do at the city level, at the state level, obviously beyond that, but in the scope of this election, I was talking about things like counting our emissions, which is important if you want to get rid of them. The council passed a little bit ago a rental weatherization ordinance, which would put the burden of weatherizing buildings on landlords, which Like any good climate policy, we need to protect working people from the impact of the financial ramifications of transitioning off of fossil fuels.
That looks like good incentives. That looks like financing for doing [00:20:00] electrical work. And it also looks like saying, Hey, if you own more than one property, you have to be responsible for this instead of your tenants. Or if you’re an individual homeowner, there are incentives. Those incentives could be better.
So there’s these kind of Small scale with big impact things we could do that we haven’t done. There’s also a building decarbonization ordinance that passed last year, but is quite weak and is supposed to tax dirty fuels and Require that large buildings over a certain size Do not rely on fossil fuels.
There are a couple easy ways to make this stronger And we could do that because again, that’s about saying Let’s put the onus of this transition on entities that can afford it instead of working families. There’s also the question of our energy source. We need to transition off of McNeil. It is, I think in the grand scheme, a lesser evil for right now, if for no other reason than it already exists.
It’s a balance of, of saying [00:21:00] like, gosh, this is ugly. We have to act quickly and bringing that urgency without making people feel hopeless, which is always hard work in, in the climate world. And also saying, here’s a bunch of really concrete policy changes we can make that will bring us at least a little bit more into alignment with a climate future that’s
Gabriel Coleman: livable.
Yeah, yeah. Your statement on McNeil being the lesser evil pinged something for me because I’m writing this chapter right now on Ireland’s natural gas grid. Yeah. Earth’s pipeline system and the origins of that and how it ties in with fertilizer. I’m very excited about the chapter. I always come back to Christopher Jones, he has a book called Routes of Power, and one of his arguments is that infrastructure creates dependency on that infrastructure.
And so like, yes, sure, Nick Neal is the lesser evil because it already exists and because it’s not a coal burning plant. But it also is the greater evil because it is what people are depending on.
Lena Greenberg: It’s because it’s what [00:22:00] we have.
Gabriel Coleman: Because it’s so much easier in terms of economics and in terms of even people’s psychology, which I’m sure you run into, to think of
Lena Greenberg: we
Gabriel Coleman: need to actually rip out all of this infrastructure than to say, well, it could be worse.
Lena Greenberg: Right. And then, of course, we get into the other sticky thing, which is It’s about the nature of transition, right? If 15 years ago we had said, oh, we should really try to get some wind up and running, which we did and failed because of some people who think that it’s worse to have wind turbines on the top of mountains than fossil fuel infrastructure running through every inch of our world.
If we were 15 years ahead of where we are now, we would be in a much different place in terms of the conversation about transitioning off of McNeil. As you’ve said, right, we now rely on energy. It’s not just food, water, and shelter. It’s also energy now that we need to survive. At least, you know, in the bounds of this world and the society that we have cranking out labor under capitalism.
But, [00:23:00] if we’re gonna use energy, we need energy that we can use now until the point where we can transition off of the dirty fuel. And we’re so not there, which then gets us into this kind of spiral of like, if you’re in transition and you’re not transitioning fast enough, how do you do that without disrupting the world?
And I would argue at this point, like we should probably disrupt the world because otherwise we’re not going to be able to live on. So I, I don’t know what people need to see to believe that the stakes are higher. And we’re so sheltered, you know, here in the global North, whether in Vermont or in Ireland from.
The scale of climate disaster that our friends around the world are seeing and that makes it easy to ignore. We live in an age in which we can cushion ourselves with small luxuries so we can look away from the, the big picture doom scale thing. And boy, there’s not a lot of space in local politics [00:24:00] for really contending with the doom scale.
There’s just not room.
Gabriel Coleman: But it does seem like this is one of the real advantages of thinking locally In terms of climate politics is that like you can point to things that people can see and can understand like this weatherization bill like even McNeil if you’re in Burlington, you can go walk to it and look at it.
It’s not a global cap and trade program. It’s not
Lena Greenberg: a
Gabriel Coleman: forestation in Brazil. It’s not these huge things that we think of on the federal and the UN level. It is very powerful to think about climate on that level.
Lena Greenberg: Well, right, and it’s powerful for the same reason that doing anything else at this scale is powerful.
It’s that we’re not shouting into the void. These are things we can do. Even if the council is full of people who don’t see the urgency that the climate crisis presents, and are not particularly moved to transform systems because they’re benefiting from them, We still have enough people in this [00:25:00] town that we could have a movement that brings the council to their knees and gets them to a place where they’re like, oh gosh, maybe we should pass some climate policy.
Like this movement can exist and must exist inside or outside or both. Thankfully, we have elected a couple of climate champions and we’ll need them. And they will also need everyone on the outside to not stop making that demand loud and clear. Yeah,
Gabriel Coleman: yeah. I guess this is transitioning us a bit to the national.
What’s happened this past week in Ireland is that there were two Amendments to the constitution that were proposed. I don’t want to get into the weeds here I’m most interested in the second amendment which was referred to as the care amendment which would have taken a part of the Irish Constitution that currently says that it’s a woman’s place to be in the home and take care of her family and Changed it and broadened it to say that People within family units [00:26:00] and communities have a duty to care for each other and that the state should strive to support that.
Neither of these amendments ended up passing for a whole bunch of complicated reasons, um, and I’m not a citizen here so I wasn’t able to vote. Um, but I was really interested in the conversation surrounding both of these amendments, um, and how it differed from the conversations about our democracy and about our constitution that we have in the United States.
So there was a citizens assembly on these amendments. A citizens assembly is something that happens every few years in Ireland, where basically it’s kind of like jury duty. But for just being the government. It’s kind of, it’s like a national NPA basically. You get people together from all around the island and they come together over the course of a couple weeks, at least a week, and discuss with each other in depth.
There was one on [00:27:00] gender inequality, there was one, the most recent one was on climate a couple years ago.
Lena Greenberg: And are they randomly selected?
Gabriel Coleman: I believe so. I don’t know all the logistics, but I think it is.
Lena Greenberg: The citizens assemblies I’ve heard about, in theory and somewhat in practice, are randomly selected and to some degree kind of mimic the ancient Greek Athenian democracy, like everybody gets called up for service at some point or another.
And perhaps for another episode we can talk about the benefits and challenges of having a more direct democracy that relies on something like citizens assemblies instead of elected representatives. Yeah,
Gabriel Coleman: yeah, yeah. Let me actually just yeah, they’re randomly so it’s there’s 99 citizens and a chair. So the chair is appointed
Lena Greenberg: 99 citizens and only one of them is sitting down
Gabriel Coleman: exactly And so they’re citizens entitled to vote at a referendum Randomly selected so as to be broad representatives of Irish society.
So it is a random random sample I’m interested in [00:28:00] how it works when you have a government that you can kind of trust. Like, people are very critical of their governments locally and nationally here. There’s no fangirling or fanboying or fan personing around politicians. Like, you get, like, people still, I think, trust the government.
And so the other thing is that Because the amendments didn’t pass, the blame is on the current government. It’s their fault for not wording things the way that would pass and not communicating clearly on the ballots. The amendments were not what would pass and therefore it is the government that failed its people.
And that indictment in Ireland where the government can dissolve and that’s how you get a new election. Like, I don’t know. This, these amendments not passing could mean that we have an election this summer and we get [00:29:00] a new government because the government failed. Whoa,
Lena Greenberg: what an idea. Well, I think what you’re pointing to is that there are so many ways to have elected representation and in the U S we generally elect our representatives and then forget that they exist.
The feedback loop and accountability loop. is not happening, mostly. And maybe especially at the presidential level, like, Joe Biden is eating ice cream while allowing U. S. funded bombs to fall on innocent children in Palestine. We are mostly only offered lesser evils because the idea that we could actually hold a politician accountable and not let them get corrupted by power Or incumbency is a sign that we don’t have the kinds of checks and balances that would make it [00:30:00] possible for us to trust a government in the first place, much less say, oh, we failed at this this time, let’s try again and assume it will go better.
There’s just no reason for anyone in the United States to believe that that’s going to happen.
Gabriel Coleman: I just can’t help but think that, like, if we had some sort of an amendment, that it would be so high pressure.
Lena Greenberg: There would be millions of dollars of lobbying that happened over every word. There
Gabriel Coleman: would be ways to make the amendment bad.
But there would be the pressure that we did this impossible thing. It’s never, ever going to happen again. So you have to bite the bullet and vote for something that you maybe believe in partially, like you believe in the spirit of, but not the wording of,
Lena Greenberg: but you know, it could be better. And then
Gabriel Coleman: in the case that it didn’t pass, the blame would not be on the government.
It would be on the voters. Like that’s the attitude I think that people take. In the government. And it is from this desperation of having lesser evils, and that’s all we have is lesser [00:31:00] evils. That if you vote for the wrong person, or, that’s all we do. We only vote for people. We don’t do anything else in America.
Lena Greenberg: If you vote for the wrong
Gabriel Coleman: person, then it’s your fault that things good.
Lena Greenberg: It’s a nice thought to bring us back to the local level. Part of why it feels worth it. To me, and to so many others, to be involved at the local level in the U. S., bringing us back to that context, is that it actually does feel like it’s possible to have a greater good option instead of just a lesser evil.
And Because of the scale of a country like the U. S., at the national level, there’s so many layers of power and control that are between people who are making decisions and the systems they’re making decisions about. Those are, you know, the voters and the electeds. That, you know, It’s very hard to actually demand something different enough [00:32:00] to get a critical mass of support and pass something or elect someone.
At the local level, we can run candidates who say, actually, maybe we should just tear all the fossil fuel infrastructure out of the ground, and maybe we should actually invest in an energy future that will give us a livable planet, and It’s, I think, just more possible to build the courage it takes to ask for that at a smaller scale because it is so hard and is such a huge transition for us.
Gabriel Coleman: Mm hmm. Yeah. My one issue with that is that local and state governments are so often just completely bankrupt and don’t have the power of the purse of Congress to devote a bunch of money and so it makes that kind of change and especially investment changes. really hard for people to imagine.
Lena Greenberg: And that’s connected to the way that we tax people, right?
And the way that we [00:33:00] tax people has so much to do with ideas about property ownership and individualism, and even family structure, such that we have a tax base that is responding to a political reality that is not our political reality. And relies on people saying, Oh, I might someday be rich. Therefore, we should not take the risk and tax rich people.
We got enough rich people in Vermont to do wild things to our tax base. And transform the way that we could spend at the local level. But instead, we allow them to flee to Florida with their income tax that they do not pay to us.
Gabriel Coleman: Yeah, I, I guess it’s a false choice. I think about Minnesota, like state student debt, because I can push the federal government to forgive federal debt, but I don’t know if there are movements for states to forgive state loans to students.
Lena Greenberg: And
Gabriel Coleman: I think in my mind, well, Minnesota doesn’t have the money that the [00:34:00] federal government does. It can’t just write off people’s debt the way that the federal government can, but. You also think about Minnesota being where Target, and Best Buy, and Cargill, and Medtronic, and all of these.
Lena Greenberg: requires that we ask questions about what other money is happening.
And there’s other money happening. Right. And one of the things that kept coming up in our election cycle is that our school budgets keep going up for an assortment of reasons. One of which is that we’ve lost a bunch of schools to PCB contamination, which Monsanto should be paying for. And another is that Blue Cross Blue Shield, this tremendous corporation, basically has a stranglehold on health insurance premiums, which keep going up, are part of the school budget, and then the school budgets are failing.
So the question that maybe you’re pointing to is like, what is our role as individuals, part or not part of government, In saying some of [00:35:00] this negotiation, some of this challenge exists in the public realm, but probably the vast majority of it exists in the private realm in which we have to challenge these corporations that are holding most of the wealth that is present in a state like Vermont or Minnesota, or even a country like the United States.
And in doing so, preventing us from investing in the bold transitions and the kind of transformative. Change that we need to one navigate the climate apocalypse with as much grace as possible and to do right by people
Gabriel Coleman: what are the things that we’ve been coming to in any big system conversation like not getting overwhelmed by the oppression on the huge scale and Changing what you can and working with what you can on the small scale and on the human scale Like this Adrienne Marie Brown thing.
That’s like small small as good small as all like You Every change is in effect, a small change. [00:36:00] That’s something you’re talking about in your campaign and why Burlington, even though it’s a big town, small city is still important, and I really appreciate that you have your finger on, because it’s a scary thing to think about.
A lot of people have in the back of their head, but don’t articulate, which is that climate change means that we will have to face disasters in our own lives. And that building communities of resilience where you are is how we actually get through the crisis.
Lena Greenberg: Absolutely. And we have so many teachers already on this because if you’re not white, in short, you are in a community or from a community that has experienced apocalypse brought about by white supremacy.
Whether that is ongoing, right now, in Palestine, or happened when European settlers arrived on Turtle Island. There are so many people in this world who carry stories and understanding of what it’s like to live through apocalypse. And [00:37:00] built systems that have made it possible for them to, to continue on.
Um, and. Especially in places like Burlington where most people here are white and hold a certain amount of privilege, this is a big piece of learning.
Music: Mm-Hmm. to
Lena Greenberg: do. And as a community, this is a huge piece of learning because it’s so culturally at odds with the way that decisions have been made and survival has occurred in the past.
And it’s gonna take a lot of patience and a lot of openness and willingness to learn from each other. If we’re going to make it through this crisis without just killing people who have less. And gosh, I really sincerely hope we can do that. Because we deserve better, all of us, who are going to have to live through all of these layered disasters that are going to take every form over the rest of our lives and the lives of our children and our grandchildren.
We have to believe, right, that [00:38:00] operating at a scale we can grasp, and in a community whose size is comprehensible to us, we can build those new systems, and do something other than what we are currently relying on.
Gabriel Coleman: It’s interesting that we’ve been talking about, like, the greater good. It’s so superhero y, but like, I think that’s, that’s what kind of is galvanizing me, not galvanizing me, but allowing me to still like deal with US politics, being outside of it and still having to engage with it.
And especially in terms of climate, knowing that what happens in the US determines our climate future, essentially, um,
Lena Greenberg: yeah,
Gabriel Coleman: but there’s so little that the rest of the world can do to change it is this idea of rejecting lesser evils. like rejecting choices between what is the lesser evil and striving for a scale at which you can find a greater good and push that.
Lena Greenberg: Right, and it’s so connected to [00:39:00] another conversation happening right now about the zero sum game. We aren’t being anti semitic when we say We have to free Palestine. It’s just not a zero sum game. And this comes up in climate, too. It’s not that we have to sacrifice jobs and economic potential if we’re gonna have a climate resilient renewable energy world.
It’s that actually we need both and as in any polarizing situation, it really becomes us to our own Say no, the terms of this zero sum game are forcing us to stay within existing power structures and preventing us from imagining what it’s like to have a different power structure in which we can all have enough.
Yeah, and we don’t have to extract and oppress to make it viable for all of us.
Gabriel Coleman: Yeah, I’m thinking now about what you said at the beginning about not wanting to talk about politics and wanting to [00:40:00] talk about movements instead and not wanting to call movements politics. And it’s making me think that like the good kind of politics is really just movement building and
Lena Greenberg: our
Gabriel Coleman: larger goal in working towards positive change in terms of colonialism, climate change, oppression, and all sorts of making the world better for everyone.
is making politics more like movement building.
Lena Greenberg: Right. We need political work all the time, elections or no, because we have a lot of work to do and it will happen through the
Gabriel Coleman: movement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the real change is not voting for people, it’s, it’s working with people. You shouldn’t have to put your whole life into it.
And think about it every single moment of every day. I guess the two of us are never shut off kind of people, but
Lena Greenberg: you can participate at any level at which it is possible for you to participate. And we need you to do that. The two of us, the
Gabriel Coleman: two of us need you, listener, [00:41:00] to do that. This is your call to action, but your action is whatever you want to do.
Lena Greenberg: At any scale, whether it is finding your place in the movement through cooking meals for people who are showing up to actions or going to city council or whatever, or if you’re the one who’s getting arrested, or if you’re the one who’s running for office, we need everyone to, to find a place in this work.
Yeah.
Gabriel Coleman: I think actually the paradigm I would like to impose instead of voting for people. is that the only valid political action is cooking a meal. Like, if you’re not cooking a meal for someone, then you’re not doing politics.
Thanks very much for listening to this episode of the Polyculture Podcast. I did the theme music, and the episode is edited by Lena Greenberg and myself.
If you’ve got any questions or comments you can email us at polyculture(at)gabriel.Town, and we hope to be back in your feed very soon with a new [00:42:00] episode.
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