Climate Week at Caravan of Dreams #10 · Cleaned Transcript
September 24, 2026 · Caravan of Dreams, East Village, NY
A late-afternoon panel in the Dream Room, recorded on the house mic. The recording begins a few words into the host's welcome. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the conversation kept intact. The whale recording played during the listening journey is described, not transcribed, and so is the short video shown before the legal section. Names, cases and figures spoken aloud were checked where a source exists; a few figures that could not be confirmed are left out rather than guessed. The host and panelists are named; people in the room are not. It is not verbatim.
Download as .txtFrye · ...animist at some point in time. Before we get into introductions and what we do in the world, I'd love to ground this in why we're here. I love being in a room with people who care so much about what's happening to our biodiversity right now, and what we can do to protect it. So let's start there with our panelists, whom I'll introduce in a minute. What's an animal or an ecosystem you really connect with? How did you realize you were team biodiversity? Share a one-minute story. We have a corded mic, sorry about that, so we'll pass it back and forth.
Shohadaee · I've been meditating on this question all day, and I landed on the old-growth forests. I've always been very connected to trees and the ecosystems that live within them. Years before I moved to California I'd seen a film, What Dreams May Come, with a scene in the redwoods, and I thought, I have to go there. It came on the heels of a big download. Find me after and I'll tell you about the download I received directly from a tree. The tiniest snippet of the peak of the story: standing in this tree, my vision goes all the way down, all the way in, and I'm watching all the devastation across the planet. And then it was just: you can help. It was so clear. The vision came back, I opened my eyes, and here I am, the rest of my life. A direct download from the forest. Protecting those ecosystems is one of the most important things to me.
Levitan · Hi everyone, it's great to be here. I'm Ben from Earthjustice, and I never pass up an opportunity to talk about horseshoe crabs. They're an adorable arthropod. They look kind of clumsy and helpless, but the species has survived for more than 400 million years. They're a keystone species where they live, and their interactions with the species that rely on them are so elegant. In particular there are migratory shorebirds like the red knot that fly every year from as far as Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America, all the way to the Arctic and back, a round trip of many thousands of miles. They stop on the east coast of the United States in the spring, just as the horseshoe crabs are coming out of the water to spawn on the beach. When things are going well, there's such a superabundance of horseshoe crab eggs that they not only sustain the horseshoe crab population but feed the entire ecosystem. The red knots arrive depleted and exhausted from their journey, and they gorge on horseshoe crab eggs, as much as doubling their body weight in two weeks. That's what gives them the energy to complete their migration and breed successfully in the Arctic. So I would protect horseshoe crabs.
Rodríguez-Garavito · Hi, I'm César. I have a special attachment to a particular forest in the high Andean cloud forest ecosystem. It's called Los Cedros, the cedars. It was the subject of a well-known ruling by the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, which declared this forest a subject of rights in 2021, and I've had the privilege of working in and for Los Cedros ever since. When I'm there with my students, some of whom are here, I'm reminded of what a vibrant forest looks and feels like. I grew up in the Colombian Andes, and being in Los Cedros is a way to imagine what the mountains I grew up in would have been like if they hadn't been deforested. Specifically, I love seeing the symbiosis between the hummingbirds and a tree called the yarumo in Spanish, which is the signal of an ecosystem's recovery: it's the first to take over the depleted patches of a forest. Seeing yarumos in full bloom in Los Cedros, and then seeing them bloom in other places that haven't been as protected, is always a sign of hope for me.
Frye · These are so fun. I wish we could hear from everybody in the room; maybe after. It's hard to pick just one story. I worked on a big international ocean conservation campaign. I was one of the main US organizers. We failed, and it was devastating. For a moment I thought maybe it was pointless to talk about climate, until I discovered the world of artivism, and that started my podcast, Climate Shifted.
But it wasn't until I reconnected with what I love so much about this place that the trajectory of my work shifted. I was on a diving trip in Cozumel, in Mexico, one of my favorite reefs, on the Mesoamerican reef. We had this incredible moment with about fifteen giant spotted eagle rays. They were swimming in the current but looked as if they weren't moving at all, and for maybe fifteen minutes we were just checking each other out. The way their bodies undulated perfectly in the current. I thought, millions of years of evolution have led to you being able to do exactly that. Seeing their gills open and close with every breath, breathing water, which feels so alien to me as an air breather. But they're not alien. We share this planet with them. I started crying and sobbing into my regulator, and I said, I am sorry, and I love you, and I promise I will do everything I can to protect you. It reminded me how important it is to regularly reconnect with what we love about this place, because that's what fills us and supports us in doing hard work. Showing up and fighting for our biodiversity is hard work, and we have to resource ourselves. Whales are my favorite animals, for sure; that's a whale-eye tattoo I just got. But that moment really solidified things for me. Look to your left and your right: these are all people who give a damn. It's truly an honor to be here with every one of you.
Frye · Today we'll hear from a few different folks. To my left, César Rodríguez-Garavito, director of the More-Than-Human Life program out of NYU Law, a.k.a. MOTH, really at the forefront of the rights of nature. To his left, Ben Levitan, a senior attorney in the Biodiversity Defense Program at Earthjustice. And to his left, Roxi Shohadaee, the founding director of the Design Science Studio, an incubator that teaches the science of how to create for the benefit of all life, and the founder of habRitual, an experience design agency that has done a bunch of activations, like the ones for 30 by 30 at the COP. It's hard to get it into a pithy one-liner, and we'll talk about a lot of it.
And I'm Eva Frye. I'm the host, founder and executive producer of Climate Shifted, a podcast about what works to shift people on climate. I interview artivists, psychologists and behavior designers on the front lines about what actually works to start climate movements: how you bypass defensiveness, and how you get sustained behavior change over time. In the process of doing the podcast I became a bit of an artist myself. I happen to really love whales, and whale bioacoustics are a powerful way to get people plugged in and build the empathy bridge to these creatures, so that we fall in love with them and want to protect them. So I started doing these listening journeys, which we're about to do right now. I was just doing this in Iceland to try to end commercial whaling, using love and awe and wonder and curiosity to get people to fall in love with these animals.
Frye · Get really comfortable in your seat and shake off the day. I know we've all been bopping around a lot of Climate Week events. Make sure your phones are on silent. Now the invitation is to close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Feel the gravity of the Earth on your body, your seat in your chair, your feet on the earth, the lightness of the air on your skin.
Imagine you're walking to the edge of the ocean. As you do, your nostrils migrate to the top of your head. Your legs are absorbed into your body. And as you swim off, you feel absolutely weightless, even though you weigh many, many tons. Imagine what it must be like to be born in a medium you can't breathe, and to have your aunties lift you to the surface to take your first breath. Imagine what it must be like to have so much of your brain given to community and social bonds. How might you take care of each other? Your mom has been calling you by your name since you started growing in her belly. You're so social; you do many things together, including hunting. You gather in circles, a leader tells you now is the time, and in a very coordinated effort, almost a ballet, you spiral up, blowing bubbles that catch your prey at the top of the water. Imagine what it must be like to never take more than you need, and to leave more than you take. When you poop, it fertilizes the entire food chain. What must that be like, to be good for your ecosystem? Imagine what it must be like to find your way almost entirely through sound. What do you say to each other? How do you coordinate? And now we listen to them hunt.
[A stereo hydrophone recording plays: humpback whales calling as they feed together, bubble-net feeding.]
Frye · Wow. What we just experienced together is whale culture: the elders teaching the young ones how to live, survive and thrive. It was first witnessed off the coast of Alaska, and only there, and now it's spreading. I wonder what else we don't know about their culture. Just as I wonder who the 93 fin whales were who were killed in Iceland this season by commercial whaling. Let's hold a moment of silence with them in a moment. I wonder about the pregnant mothers who were killed. I wonder what their names were, and whether their families miss them.
Right now is a really important time for whales across the world, and in Iceland. We'll probably touch on what we can do in this conversation. There's going to be an important examination of a whaling bill in Iceland in February, so now is the time to apply pressure, internally and externally, so they do the right thing and end commercial whaling. We can have a moment of silence, if you'd like.
[A moment of silence.]
Frye · Thank you all for doing that and for being here. Quick logistics note: we'll have audience Q&A at the end, so start thinking about good questions.
Frye · César, you direct the More-Than-Human Life program at NYU Law, where you've been working on the rights of nature, and y'all have taken quite an interest in whale bioacoustics. Why whales, and why whale speech? What's the strategy?
Rodríguez-Garavito · I've spent quite a bit of time listening to whales live, mostly in Dominica and New Zealand, two places where we work with scientists and Indigenous leaders, including on the implementation of an amazing whale rights declaration out of Aotearoa New Zealand. Why whales? For many reasons. First of all, as a lawyer and advocate, many of the people and places you work with and for come to you, rather than you going around looking for interesting cases. At MOTH, whales came to us via Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, a collective of marine biologists, roboticists, cryptographers and AI scientists trying to understand the complexity and beauty of sperm whale communication. By the way, the whales I know best are not humpbacks, and I've learned that marine biologists are very particular about species. I once had a designer put an image of a humpback whale on one of my slides in a talk I was doing with David Gruber of CETI, and I've never seen David more offended, because it's all about sperm whales.
Whales also have a very important history in environmental activism and environmental law. The songs of the humpback whales recorded by the Paynes around 1970 ignited a movement across the world to protect not only whales but marine ecosystems. That movement was partly responsible for the moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, although there are unfortunately still exceptions. Before rights of nature work I did very high-stakes human rights work in Latin America, including in my own country, Colombia, in the middle of a civil war. Of all the human and non-human communities and individuals I've worked with, I've never seen a more charismatic species than whales, sperm whales. People immediately relate to them. They're mysterious, they're big, and we know they're highly intelligent, social beings. We don't work for them and with them for instrumental purposes. But if you were looking for a charismatic individual who can get people to care about other forms of life, it would be a whale.
More recently there's the question of whale communication. There's something special about language, and it cuts both ways. It's why many people are enamored with large language models and confuse them for human beings; don't get me started on AI. Language matters because it's supposed to be the ultimate frontier of human exceptionalism. Scientists have shown that all kinds of animals are intelligent, and then the bar gets raised by those who object to animal rights: surely they're not communicative, surely they don't have languages. What CETI and other collectives are showing, which is what many Indigenous peoples around the world have been saying all along, is that there is something going on in those communications. So as a legal tool, showing that communication is happening, and that it's impaired by incessant human noise from ship traffic, all those container ships, plans for deep-sea mining, offshore oil drilling, all of which interfere with the basic medium of communication, which is water, and with the ability of whales to have individual and social lives. And finally, they're a planetary species. They migrate across the oceans. If you're looking for a species that brings home the reality of Earth as a living, breathing system, whales are a prime candidate.
Frye · I saw you speak last year, and I found it so interesting to understand the legal strategy behind rights of nature. There are a lot of storytellers and systems change makers here without a deep legal background. I remember you saying you're trying to change the legal framework from a what to a who. And when you're a who, you have rights: to migrate, to raise your young. Can you speak to that?
Rodríguez-Garavito · Exactly. My colleagues who do this work with us are here, and so are students working on this project. First, when we speak about biodiversity, the word does a poor service to what we're trying to protect. It's life. I like to talk about life. I used to run a reading group at the law school called Climate Emergency Lawyers for the Anthropocene, and I renamed it to the law, life and love of nature, because that speaks to what people care about. I don't have to tell this to storytellers, but for us lawyers and advocates the technical terms sometimes trip us up, because you need them to be intelligible to courts and policymakers.
What we're trying to do is exactly what you said. We have a huge amount of scientific and cultural evidence that whales are sentient, intelligent, communicative, social beings that live in cultures. They have dialects: whale-ish sounds very different in Australia than in Dominica. Among sperm whales, the first coda they utter distinguishes them as coming from a specific place. They're basically telling each other, I'm from Brooklyn, versus I'm from Manhattan, and therefore I come from this culture. So in our research, our advocacy and the litigation we support, we translate that realization, that whales are subjects, into law. They even have similarities with human beings, but I don't want to give the impression that an animal, an ecosystem or a river needs to resemble us to have rights. The point is that those are forms of being alive on the planet that have intrinsic moral and legal value. That's why we advance their rights.
Very concretely, the legal strategy currently works at two levels. One, we support litigation at the domestic level, for example a fantastic lawsuit in Mexico against LNG terminals that would completely disrupt the lives of the whales of the Gulf of California. The case was filed by Nuestro Futuro, and we're supporting them with scientific and legal arguments based on international law. Two, we're working with Māori leaders from Hinemoana Halo, a great organization in Aotearoa, on the implementation of the first-ever Indigenous-led declaration on the rights of whales. This is all about turning that fantastic piece of legal craftsmanship and cultural revival into protections on the ground across the world.
Frye · Did you just say whale-ish? That's fantastic, I didn't know that term and I'm very happy that I do. Tell us more about the whale declaration: why it's important, what it means, and how binding it might be.
Rodríguez-Garavito · It's very important. If you haven't read it, it's online at whaledeclaration.org. It was signed by very prominent Indigenous authorities from Polynesia and the Pacific Island nations, and it lists the rights whales should enjoy, from the right to life to the right to cultural life. Importantly, it's all based on Indigenous values. The idea is that it's not only AI or contemporary digital technology, or even the recording technology of the 1970s, that brings us closer. Human beings have been in relationship and in communication with whales, quite literally, for the longest time. The wayfinders of Polynesia learned to cross the open seas partly by observing not only the stars, the winds and the currents, but the migration of ocean beings. That has become principles and values, and the declaration translates them into operational rules and into institutions like marine protected areas, which are also a form of protection in international law. Those values, if translated into Western legal protections, would make a huge difference for the lives of whales across the world.
Frye · I just got back from a tour trying to end commercial whaling in Iceland. Iceland doesn't own these whales, yet it's a sovereign nation and is allowed to do what it wants in its own waters. How might the rights of nature start to change that? Could we say these aren't only Icelandic whales, they belong to the whole planet, and therefore we must protect them?
Rodríguez-Garavito · Great question. There are institutions in international law, like the common heritage of humanity, that were crafted in times of anthropocentric dominance but can be translated through ecocentric approaches to protecting life on the planet. We're beginning work with scientific, Indigenous and policy organizations to establish transboundary migratory corridors. If you look at the maps of whale migration routes, they literally crisscross the world. I have no idea where the whales that show up in Iceland come from, but the global map of whale migration can serve as a blueprint for planetary lanes for whales to move across. The notion that there should be dedicated lanes to protect whales as they migrate runs counter to the logic of national jurisdiction; that's why they're called transboundary migratory corridors. I'm very hopeful about it. It will take years. Ideas take years to take hold in international law. But there are ways to make progress at the national level. Marine protected areas are dedicated areas for the protection of marine life, and they operate nationally, but if you have enough of them you can envisage a patchwork of MPAs that resembles a transboundary migratory corridor, at least in some regions. So those are the two approaches: domestic efforts to create MPAs, and work toward migratory corridors at the planetary level.
Frye · There's a lot to say about MPAs, too, and about the Trump administration now allowing fishing in ours. We'll get there. But Roxi and I, as storytellers and experience designers, think a lot about culture shift and artivism, and I know that matters to MOTH. You host a festival that someone told me about earlier this week: have you ever heard of a law group that throws festivals with good music and good art that people actually attend?
Rodríguez-Garavito · This is what happens when you talk about whales: everyone forgets about everything else. But I'll say a couple of things about the festival, because it is cool. It's organized by a bunch of lawyers, but most people who take part are not lawyers, and we have everything up to after-parties in places like this. This could be the place for an after-party; I'm thinking seriously about it now. There's so much hunger for this kind of work, the work all of you are doing, and a yearning for people to connect with each other, that the festival grew very quickly. We've held it for two years now, the first here in New York City and the second in London, and next year it will be in London again, in late May. So if you're looking for reasons to go to London, that's a great time. We also used to run a conference where people submitted papers. Now we'll accept posters, where people pitch an idea, share a campaign they're running, or do a short performance, as a separate event here in New York around this time next year, just before Climate Week. And finally, we have a fellowship program.
This movement is growing. When I first litigated a rights of nature case, in the Colombian Amazon, the first successful rights of nature case in the Amazon, very few organizations and individuals were working on the idea. It was seen as a long shot. Things have changed, to the point that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has issued an advisory opinion endorsing the idea of the rights of nature. What I find most hopeful is that it appeals to all kinds of people, because it taps into a moral reservoir and a reservoir of imagination. Artists are the ones who have been building it out and giving it life. That's why there's so much art on it, from documentaries to murals to installations. A museum of contemporary art in Mexico is running a whole exhibition on more-than-human rights, and the Design Museum in London did an exhibition on the more-than-human. Designers, architects, storytellers and musicians of all kinds are at the vanguard of this movement.
Frye · That's really why we're here today: to understand what's happening with our biodiversity protections. Everyone in this room has been seeing the news and not wanting to read any more of it. But you're right, it's culture that shifts everything, so artists and storytellers are critical right now. Sometimes culture shift comes before policy shift. Not always, but I'm thinking of civil rights, of same-sex marriage. Sometimes they have to go hand in hand. So we're here to understand what's going on with our biodiversity protections and how we can all activate as storytellers, because right now it's all hands on deck, and the antidote to anxiety is action. My hope is that we leave a little more bonded in community, which is very resourcing, and a little more informed, so we can go out and protect what we love and keep showing up for it. We're going on an arc: César started us on the rights of nature, then we'll go into what Ben is working on, and Roxi and I will close with some experience design.
Frye · I'm going to show you a video Patagonia posted this week. It doesn't feel good, so I'm warning you. But I think it's important that we have a real conversation about what's going on.
[The video plays: a fast scroll of recent federal rollbacks, among them offshore wind projects halted, the Endangered Species Act weakened, the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments cut, and a proposal touching Yosemite. It ends on a call to hold unchecked power to account.]
Frye · So, that's a lot. That's what we're being fed in our news, and it's what's really happening. It's easy to tune out when you get so much of it, and I think that's part of the strategy: give us so much that we become overwhelmed and stop engaging. Right now we have to engage, and that's exactly what Earthjustice is doing. Ben, y'all must be really busy. What do you say when you see things like this, and what are the most important things you're working on?
Levitan · Thanks, Eva. It's daunting to speak after watching that flurry of attacks on the environment. I'd like to frame the next few minutes around what we as lawyers can do to respond. A big part of it is not getting overwhelmed, not getting lost in the chaos, and thinking strategically about where we can have the biggest impact and which fights matter most. I'm happy to talk about this in a room of artists and storytellers. As a lawyer I care a lot about what happens in the courtroom, but that's one piece of the puzzle. The system of laws will only be part of what we're all trying to build together, which is a culture that values biodiversity and understands the role all species and ecosystems play on our planet.
There are three issues I want to highlight. They're prominent in the news and big priorities for us at Earthjustice. The first is the rescission of the regulatory definition of harm under the Endangered Species Act. The ESA is one of the most effective and beloved conservation laws we have. It has protected 99% of the species listed under it from going extinct, and it's supported by wide majorities across the political spectrum. The administration can't unilaterally change the text of the law, so it's trying to change the regulations that implement it. It's trying to say that what everyone has understood the law to mean since it passed in 1973 isn't what it means. One of the most egregious ways is rescinding the definition of harm. Under the ESA, people are prohibited from harming endangered species, and for more than 50 years a regulation on the books has said what is pretty intuitive: if you destroy the place where a species lives or feeds or breeds, you are harming that species. The administration is pretending that by eliminating that regulation it can also eliminate the statutory protection against destroying habitat. That's not how laws work, and Earthjustice is in court to stop it.
Those regulatory changes aren't the only way the administration has the ESA in its crosshairs. There's an obscure provision that lets a group of cabinet officials form a committee and exempt certain federal actions from some of the ESA's requirements. Informally it's called the God Squad, because it can say a federal action should go forward even if it could wipe a species off the face of the Earth forever. When I say obscure, I mean it hadn't been invoked for decades, until this year, when the administration convened the God Squad to exempt from ESA requirements all the oil and gas leases the federal government will issue in the Gulf of Mexico for the next five years. It was done without any legitimate justification, and they didn't follow the right process. So we're in court on this too. Even while that litigation goes on, there's one hopeful coda. The move got a lot of backlash. Shortly after, there was a bill in Congress to make some really bad amendments to the text of the Endangered Species Act, and that bill failed, with some Republicans vocally opposing it. As bad as things are, there's a limit beyond which people just aren't going to take it.
The third is the Roadless Rule. It's a regulation put in place 25 years ago that protects the roadless areas of our national forests, areas that currently have no roads, from road building. And by road building I mean roads for chainsaws and logging trucks. The Roadless Rule has protected 44 million acres of national forest for 25 years. It's incredibly popular and incredibly successful, and this administration is trying to rescind it. Earthjustice has defended the Roadless Rule since its inception. It has been under attack for all those 25 years and we've successfully defended it, and we're doing that again now. We're in the public comment period, so this isn't final. This is the time for people's voices to be heard. So one immediate request for everyone in this room: please submit a comment opposing the rescission of the Roadless Rule. When it was adopted 25 years ago, over a million people submitted comments supporting it, back when people had to mail them in. It's a lot easier now, online, and we're hoping to get at least a million people opposing the rescission. Eva, thank you for putting the link up. If you missed the code, go to saveroadlessforests.com. Tell your friends and family, and if you have an online reach, use that too. We'd be really grateful if you'd help us reach that million.
Frye · One thing before you go on. It was interesting to hear how important these comments actually are for you. As a person who cares, and a voter, it's hard to imagine how an individual comment helps. There's no feedback loop that says this comment meant something and did something. So here's a provocation for this room of storytellers and systems change makers: how do we make calling your senators and commenting on these things part of your civic duty, as urgent as voting in every election? I don't comment on much, because it doesn't feel like it goes far. That's a real tension we should think about.
Levitan · I really appreciate that. I admit, when I submit a comment to this administration, they don't drop everything and do what I say, so I understand where people are coming from. But comments matter for a few reasons. One, they form the legal record for the regulation. When it's litigated, anything in the comments, especially scientific data, is something the agency has to reckon with, and it can show the agency made an arbitrary decision that a court will overturn because there was material in the comments it didn't consider. Beyond that, showing your support or opposition keeps the environmental movement alive, and it's impactful for members of Congress, who can demand accountability. If a million people don't like this, that's a million constituents they need to pay attention to. It also sets these terrible policies up for reversal by the next administration. If we get a saner administration and it asks what to undo first, and it can see that something made people really angry, that goes high on the list. And yes, it's part of civic duty. In a democracy, what one person does shouldn't be the deciding factor; that would be a dictatorship. But we're all working together to build a culture of concern for these issues, and when we contribute our voices and our influence to that movement, we can build the country we're trying to build.
Frye · Hell yeah. A question for both of you. Considering this room of storytellers, systems change makers and artists, what are the highest-impact things we could do to help you? If you were to make an ask of the room, what are you grappling with that you'd want some brains and hearts on?
Rodríguez-Garavito · Two things. One, in my experience artists play a key role in social movements and legal movements, because they can imagine possibilities that aren't alive or obvious to those of us inside the legal system or institutions. Some analysts have written about art as prefigurative politics: anticipating what's possible, then working with many others to bring that possibility down to Earth. Conversely, when artists come to us, they see us as a potential outlet for their art and imagination. For example, we've worked with a fantastic artist collective out of London, Marshmallow Laser Feast. They make gorgeous, high-tech installations. They did a show at Kew Gardens, an installation on an oak tree that shows everything happening in and around it, all the insects that live on the tree, showing people what nature does that we can't fully perceive. That's a huge contribution. And they told us they want these beautiful pieces, which take so much time and effort, to make a difference. So we're working with them to bring some of those images to bear on the campaigns we run.
The second contribution we've already seen: many people are drawn to support legal actions, or to comment, because they're attracted by beauty. The first thing we hear about MOTH, from literally every other person, is that our website is so beautiful. That's our lead artist, who created hybrid beings, like unicorns, just for MOTH. Once people's sense of beauty is tapped, all kinds of emotional and political possibilities become accessible. That connection between the eye or the ear and then the heart and the brain is something activism, including legal advocacy, can benefit from hugely.
Levitan · I'll give two answers: one practical, and one a little more whimsical. The practical one is to use your platforms to help get these messages out about protecting biodiversity. MOTH runs some incredible events, and Earthjustice has a great communications department, but we'll only reach so many people. Biodiversity is a great way to reach people; at Earthjustice our biodiversity posts get some of our highest response rates. But if you can amplify it, so it's not just us asking for comments or asking people to care about horseshoe crabs, but other people telling that story too, then we're all so much more powerful and more united. The second answer is more personal, and maybe sounds less rational: tell someone about your favorite species. It's really important for us to spread that magic. In this time, it's kind of dark. We have to be the reservoir of concern and the reservoir of love for nature, so that whatever is happening in Washington, we have a stronghold that won't be defeated. We saw that Patagonia video of all the attacks on the environment. Everyone is seeing that news, but it doesn't have to be the only news they see. Don't let it be. Tell them about something beautiful, something you love, and remind them that it is also part of the world, and that it's mainly what we're working for.
Frye · Love all of that, and it tees us up beautifully for Roxi. Now that we've heard the state of the union on the legal battles, let's shift into some play, some strategizing, some creative thinking. We can talk about activations we've done in experience design for biodiversity and what has worked, and I know you do a lot of education around this. I want to start by talking about love and joy. How critical are they in all of this?
Shohadaee · We protect what we love. And there's so much data about this, for the scientific minds. All of us in this room are showing up because we care, because we've experienced the delight of watching a fern unfurl, felt the rain on our skin, and some of us have felt that flurry underwater. I had the great honor of seeing the Great Barrier Reef at its peak, and I squealed underwater, seeing a clam as big as my upper torso, glowing iridescent. I didn't think that was a real thing that happened underwater. So joy and love are critical. It's also part of remembering that it isn't only the doom. A few of us held a beautiful event here on Tuesday about interrupting the doom story, reimagining the story and the power of possibility, and how important it is to tell those beautiful stories and make visible all the good work that's happening.
Listening to all of this, I feel it in my body, so let's take a little breath. Find the bottom of your exhale. Inhale together. Open mouth, exhale. Two more times. Inhale, and exhale. This last time, remember that your inhale is the exhale of the natural world. And then exhale, which is the inhale of the natural world.
A little context. I'm Roxi, co-founder, director and ARTchitect of the Design Science Studio. Happy to see some of our visionaries, educators and alumni in the room. The Design Science Studio is an educational cultural incubator and community of practice that brings together artists, designers, cultural producers, writers, storytellers, scientists and architects who want to direct their creativity toward a more just, equitable and regenerative future for all of life. It started in 2020, recognizing an important gap: building the capacity of all of us as creative beings to put that creativity in service of life. That work can be very isolating, and community matters for our resilience, for connecting to what we love, and for remembering that joy, that sense of belonging and momentum. It has reached artists and creatives from 50 countries, around 350 projects and 460 people since 2020. It's a decade-long initiative connected to the Design Science Decade. Design science comes from Buckminster Fuller, and the studio was created as a partnership, co-founded by my creative studio, habRitual, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Design science is short for comprehensive anticipatory design science: start with the whole, look ahead, design with intention, and learn through experience.
Part of my core quest in this life, as an environmental and social justice artist and scientist, and a protopian futurist, is to harness the power of art and experience to catalyze social and systemic change, through transdisciplinary collaboration for the regeneration of our culture and our planet, and through shared experience like the one we had earlier: listening to them feeding, feeling awe and wonder at an experience we don't know and will never get to know. That's beautiful, and powerful. I got that download from the tree 18 years ago, and it's been a 20-year quest, looking as an artist and a scientist at the intersection of culture and ecology, our relationship with the more-than-human world. After having incredible opportunities to bring people together through large-scale immersive art, permanent, temporary, civic, in the wild, digital and in person, I saw there wasn't much support, financial or structural, for people who want to focus on this: mentorship, connections with partners who are doing the work. So we wanted to help build that bridge, so it's a little easier not only to be with your peers but to work with the people on the front lines.
Frye · Talk about the Campaign for Nature.
Shohadaee · A dear friend, Brian O'Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, sends his hellos to everybody. I was connected with him in 2021, and we formed a partnership between the Design Science Studio and the Campaign for Nature, which was on the front line of getting the 30 by 30 campaign enacted into policy, with a bunch of incredible organizations. If you're not familiar with 30 by 30, there's a lot to it, but it's about protecting 30% of our beautiful planet by 2030. In late December 2022 we were in Montreal. If you've seen the big projections during the COPs, I've had the honor of helping produce those a few times. When we got to Montreal it was a little too late to make it happen, so we decided to do it anyway. We partnered with If Not Us Then Who, an amazing organization that supports Indigenous people and young people with media training, and sometimes equipment, to tell the stories of their communities, and with a bunch of other incredible folks, to create this piece.
[The projection film plays behind the panel.]
Shohadaee · It holds a whole story that includes the five Indigenous demands. Part of why I wanted to build the bridge with those partners is that whenever we say we need to protect 30% of the Earth by 2030, the primary stewards of most of our wild places are Indigenous people, so it's incredibly important to have them at the front of that conversation. We also had amazing filmmakers, like Louie Schwartzberg, who has become a dear friend, and JR, and others, who were part of the narrative and the film. It was projected while the delegates were making policy decisions during COP15 in Montreal, right outside the window. We projected on a tall bank building and on the Notre-Dame Basilica, and we did all of it renegade.
Frye · Without a permit?
Shohadaee · Because the story needs to be told. It was powerful, and the 30 by 30 target did get adopted at that COP, which was very exciting. Then Brian and I sat down and asked what our partnership could do to support the work. He said, and you've both echoed this beautifully, that there are intervention points where people are making decisions, and a lot of those happen in closed rooms, far away from the things we're talking about protecting. So we brought together key insights from people at the Campaign for Nature and other mentors, and we created a hackathon with the Design Science Studio, and invited partners like Climate Designers, which is when Eva came in.
One of the ideas that came out of the hackathon that I thought was really powerful was a set of little intervention points, a doormat, a napkin, a sign you'd pass, that remind the people making these policy decisions of the ecosystems they're working to affect or protect.
Frye · Air, brought to you by the Andes.
Shohadaee · Air brought to you by the Andes. Water brought to you by whatever river is close by. This wooden stool brought to you by whatever forest. It showed you, in the room, everything nature has done for you, making the invisible visible, which is so beautiful. And the project Eva's crew came up with was amazing: a flash mob of endangered birds.
Frye · Have you seen birds of paradise dance? They're the best dancers on the planet. The idea was: how do we make protesting joyful again? Let's have a flash mob. Pattie Gonia, the drag queen who's always dressed in feathers and flowers, would come out and teach people about these endangered birds, and people would fall in love with them. It was around when remixing videos on TikTok was a thing, so maybe people would start remixing with the birds in their own backyard: this endangered bird near me has a super cool dance, let's learn it.
Shohadaee · Two other things, quickly. Some years ago we did a semi-permanent installation in San Francisco called The End of You, short for The End of You, the Beginning of Us. I was an advisor and helped produce and support the pieces for many months, with the Knight Foundation and Gray Area, where it was all hosted. One of the artists, Kelly Skye, spent a lot of time with the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, which has an amazing history of speculative art that had real ecological impact and changed policy; definitely look up their work. Kelly had a whole room about the rights of nature, with projection mapping and articles you could read, and there was one piece she really wanted to do and had run out of time and bandwidth for. I didn't want to let it go, so I helped her make it. It was about the size of this corner. A portrait wall: framed images of ecosystems, rivers, mountains, the eyes of whales, spiders, all kinds of creatures and watersheds. And one frame was a mirror. You stood in it, and you saw that you were part of this more-than-human family. I can't tell you how many people it landed for: I have these rights, they have these rights too, how can I help support and protect them? I feel so passionate about encouraging people to find what they love and find ways to make it visible.
The last project I'll mention just did a pilot here on Tuesday. For the last two years we've been working with Coral Vita, who do wonderful coral restoration work, together with a longtime collaborator's crew, now called Imaginal Futures, and habRitual. It will be public soon. It's a web-based interface where you chat with someone from a different timeline, in 2075, where we didn't make the changes we needed to make. You move through an arc from grief to hope to action, and you help shift the timeline. The one thing I'll leave you with: the imagery changes depending on where you are in the story and your impact on the future. As we built it with the Coral Vita team, they said no, the bad part is not bad enough. It's actually much worse. You need to make sure it's true, and visible, just how much worse it can get. That can be crippling. But there's a lot of potential and a lot of hope, the more we work together to make these issues visible and make sure what's decided is acted on. What is sacred to us, and the resacralization of life, also involves sacrifice. What are we willing to sacrifice to make life sacred again? Thank you.
Frye · A reminder that we'll have a few minutes for Q&A, so think about your questions. How we tell these stories is so important. There's room for all the stories and all the art, and some are more effective than others. Something a lot of us have realized in our work is that doom and gloom and fear will only get you so far, and they actually disengage people. So I've been working on a framework I call regenerative narrative design. If sustainability is do no harm, and regeneration is actively healing, and we recognize sustainability is no longer enough, that we have to actively heal the planet: we're doing regenerative agriculture to heal the soil, and regenerative architecture to make buildings that give more to a place than they take. Why haven't we started doing this with our stories? A lot of the stories we're fed on social media are extractive, rooted in fear, and we don't have time for those anymore. We don't have time to burn people out. There are ways of actively healing through storytelling, healing the listener and the teller.
That's why connecting regularly with what you love matters so much. Root your stories in love. Get people's attention through love and awe and wonder and curiosity; that's the way to get them to engage longer term. Then make some space to process the grief, because we have to do the real stuff too. Doom and gloom doesn't work, and positive bypassing doesn't work either, so there's a happy middle. And we always want to end by looking for the helpers, as Mr. Rogers would say. Who else is working on this? Give people hope that they're not alone. And end on a clear call to action: this is exactly what you can do to help. Make the movement irresistible; nobody joins a movement that isn't. And resource people for the long road ahead, because this is the long road. Bringing it back to what everyone on this stage has said: love, community building, taking care of yourself, doing the inner work so you can do the outer work. If you find yourself in a doom spiral, it's okay, it's normal. Step back and take care of yourself. Don't post while you're in it. Come back more resourced. We don't have time to burn ourselves out, or burn out the people listening to these stories. And it is possible.
From the room · Thank you, this is an amazing gathering, and thank you for supporting Caravan of Dreams; it's a restaurant I love. We're in a vegan place, so: we know smaller animals like dolphins are affected by commercial fishing. What is the danger of commercial fishing for whales? And I totally agree with creating events and community that raise up love and gathering. It's those little steps that help.
Rodríguez-Garavito · Thank you. Just this morning we were in a meeting with scientists and storytellers about threats to whales as they migrate across the oceans, and commercial fishing came up as one of the top three or four. Ship traffic of all kinds is the first, because of ship strikes, pollution and noise. But what happens on the high seas is still a big gap, in information, advocacy and legal action. Luckily we now have a treaty on the high seas, which will hold its first conference of the parties here in your city in January. It's a seminal legal framework that offers opportunities, but change at that level takes many years. In the meantime there's everyone from people out on the water opposing extractive operations, to scientists filling the information gaps, to concerned citizens campaigning against the most predatory forms of commercial fishing. There are regional efforts too; this morning we heard about protecting the migratory corridor in the big area of the Pacific between Panama and Ecuador that is crucial for whale migration in that part of the world. I haven't done systematic research on this, but my impression is that it's a very understudied and under-litigated area. Commercial fishing is also a source of grave human rights violations, so there's an opportunity for those of us who care about both humans and more-than-human beings to go after that kind of operation.
From the room · Ben, I want to thank you and Earthjustice. The stamina I've seen from your organization since the Trump administration came in is mind-blowing, and really encouraging. As an activist and a communicator I watch you at the very forward edge all the time. I imagine you don't have much time to think ahead right now, but do you see any glimmers where the unraveling of regulatory protection is creating new opportunities? Is there any way we could advocate for new possibilities, relative to what's being dismantled?
Levitan · It's a powerful question. Right now we're mourning the things that could have been done in the past and weren't, and thinking about how to protect against everything that's happening now in the future. There's such a litany of attacks that we need a strategy beyond going through them one by one and undoing each. And there are opportunities opening up. People are considering positive changes to the Endangered Species Act. It was such a powerful, momentous statute when it was enacted; there was almost nothing else like it in the world. And at the same time it's really modest. It's the least we can do: when a species is about to go extinct, we'll try not to let that happen. So more protection for ecosystems, rather than going species by species looking for who's on the brink, is a really exciting area to explore. Then there are direct fixes to the executive overreach we're seeing. Should there be more protections on invoking the God Squad? Could we put roadless protections in a statute, so they're not an administrative regulation ping-ponging back and forth? This administration isn't the first to try to undo the Roadless Rule. We've defeated past efforts, but it would be nice to have it anchored in law rather than in administrative priorities. We can keep ourselves busy responding to what happens every day, but I think all this activity is leading to momentum for some of those big-picture changes, so it's less of a piecemeal turf war in the future.
From the room · Deep thanks for organizing this, and for all the information and passion. One of the biggest challenges with any of these issues is knowing what to do first, what has the highest impact. Could each of you list your top three actions for the crowd? Campaigns to engage in, organizations to donate to, that kind of thing.
Frye · We've got the Roadless Rule right here, with a QR code; you can get it when everybody gets up. That's the important one Ben wanted to draw attention to. We have César's whale declaration, also on a QR code. And Roxi is doing a really fun project, a newspaper with a real editorial made of our stories about creating a more regenerative world, and you can submit to it. There's going to be another issue for New York Climate Week.
Shohadaee · If anyone has read Donella Meadows: when you understand the places to intervene in a system, culture is actually the highest leverage point. It's the highest leverage for paradigm change. So being a culture tender and a culture maker, and helping build that groundswell, is incredibly impactful. If you need someone to remind you of that, let me be that person. On the Regen Times: I'm kicking myself, because I finally got my luggage and then left behind the editions we printed this summer, but I'll get some here before I leave town. It's a physical newspaper, structured roughly in past, present and future. It invites us to take the time to envision possible futures and to say where we got to and how: what actions it took, how we connect with where we've come from and what's stirring right now. Our words shape the world, so the newspaper is an invitation and a provocation for all of you to take what you're learning this week, with each other, and spell-cast, to some extent. And to make critical things visible. You could write: for the Roadless Rule it wasn't one million people, it was two million who commented, and here's what happened because of that. And you think, hell yeah, I was part of that. For folks who contribute, we'll send you a digital version, and for a few bucks you can have a physical copy sent to you, your very own newspaper. I'll also mention the incubator we run: there's a waitlist on the designscience.studio website, and we'll let you know when applications open if you'd like to put your creativity in service of all of that.
Levitan · If you get on Earthjustice's email list, you'll see all kinds of things you can do. But for now, comment to protect the Roadless Rule. Grab the QR code if you missed it, or go to saveroadlessforests.com.
Rodríguez-Garavito · You'll find lots of ways to engage at mothlife.org. I'd suggest starting, to go back to what Roxi said, with the beings you feel most drawn to, that you feel the most love for because they're closest to you, since we work across the kingdoms of life. We've talked about whales and forests, but we also work with and for fungi. We have a whole project on protecting underground biodiversity, and my colleague is the fungi fanatic on the team. We have a long-term collaboration with SPUN, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, which is literally mapping the underground biodiversity of the planet. With them and some local communities, we've launched targeted efforts to protect forests and ecosystems based not on aboveground biodiversity, plants and animals, but on the richness of the underground world. We owe so much to fungi and to invisible mycelial networks. Without them there would be no plants, no soil and no carbon storage, and they're invisible. So if you're into invisible powers, and I feel many people here are, check out our work on and for fungi and let us know if you want to contribute.
Frye · I have an ask too. I've been doing Climate Shifted and my whale artivism pro bono for the last two years. Two things would help me continue. I'd love some paid projects, so if you know of strategy or storytelling projects out there, let me know. And I'm going to make podcasts from the work I just did in Iceland. It was a pretty wild experience. I planned on just playing the bioacoustics, and in the process I got dropped into the center of the anti-whaling movement and interviewed amazing people, from the parliamentarians who tried to pass the last whaling ban that failed, to ex-whalers who changed their minds and are now vegans, to the activists on the ground up against one billionaire who's trying to keep whaling alive even though there's no market for it. It'll be part investigative journalism, part storytelling, and since you've heard the power of these bioacoustics, I'll weave in the voices of the whales themselves, to give them a voice in this and make it experiential. That needs funding and support, so come talk to me afterward. We need to wrap up shortly, but stick around outside and connect, and order some delicious food. I've been hanging out here all week and I've tried everything on the menu.
I want to end by thanking my colleagues who recorded that piece of bioacoustics. My colleague Eric Keen recorded it off the coast of British Columbia. He sails very silently, drifts, finds the fish, and knows the humpbacks will come and find those fish, and he puts two hydrophones about 70 meters down. Everything we heard was from 70 meters down, which is crazy. Since it was recorded in stereo, my other colleague, Ken Pearce of Open Field Sound, can pull the sounds apart and map them spatially. Today was just stereo, but you can come to our sound lab in San Francisco, get inside a sound cube, and feel the animals circle around you. It was recorded in the waters of the Gitga'at First Nation, and I'm probably mispronouncing that, sorry, with the help of whale researchers in British Columbia. Thank you to all of those people. It really takes a village, and I'm grateful to every one of you for spending your afternoon with us. I don't know where this all nets out. It feels really hard right now. But I know that at the end of my life I'll look back and know I did everything I could. That's all we can do: find what you love and show up for it, and every one of you did that today. Thank you for the important work you're doing in the world.
Host · Real quick, one last logistical thing. The next event starts in 30 minutes, at 6:30, so our mission is to slowly, gently and civilly vacate the room without causing an accident. The next event is on how to build an ecological civilization, and there are still spots, so if that interests you, go to the front of house. Thank you all so much for taking the time.