Min Hyoung Song: From everyday denial into everyday attention (ep382)
“Where our power comes from actually is in that space between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’—that shared space. If we could tap into that, if we can find ways of working together, to form what I called ‘shared agency,’ then we can actually gain a lot of power to affect change.”
In this episode, we welcome Min Hyoung Song, a Professor of English and the Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Boston College, as well as a steering committee member of Environmental Studies and an affiliated faculty member of African and African Diaspora Studies. He is the author of three books: Climate Lyricism (Duke, 2022), The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (Duke, 2013) and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Duke, 2005).
Some of the topics we explore include the unique contributions of Asian Americans on environmental discourses, turning everyday denial of our socio-ecological crises into everyday attention, processing climate change through engaging with various forms of literature, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by India Blue
Episode-inspired artwork by Mi Young
Episode references:
Climate Lyricism, a book by Min Hyoung Song
“Imagining Race and the Environment”, a graduate seminar syllabus by Min Hyoung Song
“Climate Lyricism”, an interview with Min Hyoung Song on the Being Human podcast
“Do Our Lives Matter?” a talk at The Veritas Forum featuring Min Hyoung Song
Customs, a collection of poems by Solmaz Sharif
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Min Hyoung Song: I just grew up as a Korean-American in Michigan. There weren't that many of us. And I was always feeling like the person who was always socially on the outside. That experience really shaped my sense of the world. Observing how people interact with each other, I was always interested in how human difference factored into the way people are treated and mistreated. It probably didn't help that I was also not very athletic and outgoing. So a lifelong interest developed out of those early experiences, and those attuned me to how I see the world.
I was also a very introverted kid. I spent a lot of time reading and my reading habits were always attuned to paying attention to those things. It seemed like an organic growth into an interest in thinking about the role that race and racism plays, in not only the stories we tell, but what those stories have to tell about us and about our society.
The environment came a little bit later. It was always something that was on my mind, I think partly because I was such a bookworm. When I was young, I spent a lot of time just reading everything. [Some] of the things I read were [of] environmental themes. It was pretty early, [when] I was very aware of climate change and its effects on the world, back when I was in high school. This was in the 1980s and I remember in the early nineties reading new, long-form journalistic accounts of the science, and what it was telling us about the effects of carbon pollution on the world. That was just something I'd always been reading and thinking about.
For some reason, though, I always found it very difficult to integrate my interest in race and racism with my interest in climate change in particular, but also other environmental issues related to it. It took me a really long time to get to the point where I could really begin to try to talk about those two things together.
Kamea Chayne: We've welcomed people of very diverse backgrounds on the show in the past, including some Asian and Asian American activists, authors, and community leaders, though we hadn't centered those particular conversations on the Asian American experience itself.
So, given that you've gotten to really dive into this lens through your work, of course rooted in your personal experiences as well, I would love it if you could talk about how you think the Asian American experience and history through particular events and policies have contributed in unique ways to sustainability discourses.
Min Hyoung Song: There is a unique lens that studying Asian Americans provides for looking at environmental issues.
If we are talking about Asian-Americans, in large part, we're talking about a group of people who are defined by migration and also defined as refugees, as immigrants, and in a whole host of other ways.
If you're looking at early works by Asian American writers or Asians living in America, a lot of it tends to be actually works about labor, people who work the land in particular. That's a very particular way of relating to the environment, when you have to work to grow food. So there's a sort of agricultural perspective that you see in earlier works.
You see for instance, in the work of Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart, where he's a migrant laborer, often working in the fields under very brutal conditions and the descriptions of the land that he provides. You see it in later writers as well, who come from agricultural families. Lots of Japanese-Americans who first settled in the West, in the end of the 19th, early 20th century were farmers. And there's actually a strong tradition of Japanese-American farmers and their relationship to the land.
There's also, I think, a growing awareness that that perspective is often wedded to a settler-colonial perspective. That is, Asian immigrants to the Americas often mimic or copy the very ways of talking and seeing the land, that settlers from Europe saw the land. And it puts it in a very odd situation, in relationship to Indigenous people who have a very different history of relating to the land. And the irony or the difficulty of that kind of convergence is something that a lot of scholars have been thinking about.
Thirdly, what looking at environmentalism from an Asian-American perspective allows, is this focus on movement and migration, and the ways in which borders work to encourage migration as well as discourage it, and also to shape group differences. And those topics feel to me, really burning right now because one of the foreseeable consequences of growing environmental catastrophe is the greater movement of people. So migration is an issue that is intimately connected to environmental concerns. And one could argue that a lot of the harsh measures that are being put into place in the border, and the anxiety about migration are driving a lot of politics right now, not only in the United States, but in many other countries—those kinds of border policies are also climate policies.
Kamea Chayne: It's certainly really true, these unique perspectives on the role of borders, and the experience of migration itself—they seem really important as the impacts of climate change become more and more severe, and as people are forced to migrate, although that's often been criminalized or, looked down upon as immigration policies in different places continue to become more stringent. So I think these are definitely really important views, that I'm sure Asian Americans, in particular, would be able to contribute.
You teach a seminar called Imagining Race and the Environment, which takes a chronological view on how race and environmental discourses have emerged together. I know it’s been a journey for you to bridge these topics as well, but what concerns might you have had with the dominant narratives in sustainability that then compelled you to dedicate a seminar to weaving race into its foundations? And can you give us an overview of some of the themes you cover and why you feel they should be front and center in these conversations, if we are to really understand what contributed to and culminated in eco-social issues as immense as the climate crisis today?
Min Hyoung Song: That class is a graduate seminar that I recently called Imagining Race and the Environment. It's not actually as chronologically organized, as it is thematically organized. I was really interested in trying to think about how prioritizing race in a class focused on the environment could require us to change some of the intellectual categories we use to try to understand it. So the kinds of topics that might come up in an environmental humanities class that wasn't particularly interested in race, would be discussions of conservation, land use, wilderness, ideas of the wild, about the construction of our ideas of nature, which are actually really great and important conversations to have and are really rich and critical, and aren't uninterested in discussions about race.
However, to center race in those discussions, I wondered if there were new categories or categories that scholars had already been using that would be really helpful. So that course was really developed around some large thematic concerns. One was genres of the human, which is a term that was most famously coined by the Jamaican philosopher, critic, writer, actress Sylvia Wynter, in her body of work. And she's grown incredibly important within a lot of discussions about African-American, Black diaspora circles, but increasingly in other circles as well. She really advocated for attention to the idea of the human itself as historically contingent.
I was interested also in the idea of settler colonialism, which I've already mentioned, as well as racial capitalism, which is a term most closely associated with the Black historian Cedric Robinson. And then also, I was interested in thinking about concepts that might have emerged from Indigenous circles as well, and also what it means to talk about climate migration. So those were the big thematic concerns that shaped that seminar. We tried to create a theoretical apparatus around each of those big categories, and then spent the second half of the semester looking at several literary texts, thinking about how to apply those concepts to specific examples.
Kamea Chayne: It's certainly interesting to think about how our understandings of our eco-social issues might shift and change depending on whose perspectives we center, as we learn more about these topics.
More broadly, your lens has been through that of a professor of English literature, which, of course, led to the unique way that you wrote Climate Lyricism and taking readers through the different climate literature that you've engaged with. I hesitate to categorize because there are never neat boundaries but I would be curious if you've been able to broadly name the different types of climate expressions and the types of impact you think they have had.
For example, whether the differences in speech, sounds, imagery they evoke more objective or more relational voices, more creative and imaginative or more literal and nonfiction, what are some of the key technicalities of different forms of climate literature you've unpacked and thought through, in terms of the impacts they may have on the reader's sentiments and climate discourses at large?
Min Hyoung Song: One of the things that was really interesting for me about writing Climate Lyricism, is that when I set out to write it, I did not think I was going to spend so much time writing about poetry. It's not something I had written a lot about, and frankly, it's very intimidating. I think I even wrote that in the book, [being] intimidated about writing poetry, because it just felt to me already a pretty specialized domain of discussion, of critical inquiry. And I sometimes felt ill-equipped to do that work. But I kept getting drawn back to the poetry again and again, as well as to the criticism about the poetry. And I was trying to figure out why was it that the poetry spoke to me, in a way, and contemporary poetry, in particular, with all of its experimentation and radical flexibility of form.
Why did that draw me in a way that I was finding myself trying to spend a lot of time reading books that center climate change, especially novels that center climate change. And they were leaving me cold. It wasn't like I wanted to spend a lot of time with them, though I could certainly appreciate a lot of the work that they did. There is something about the structure of fiction in particular, and the long form, not narrative form, that seemed to me maybe really focused on conclusions. Everything is always driven to thinking about what happens at the end. And there's a way in which you have a plot often center around a resolution of a problem.
And maybe part of the dissatisfaction I was feeling in a lot of the novels I was reading was the sense that that form and the way that stories are structured, and novels don't really capture, for me, the challenges of trying to give shape to really transient experiences, really hard to nail down experiences.
Poetry is what seemed to me always trying to do that, trying to stay in a moment, see it in all of its complexities, put it in all sorts of different kinds of scales, and really invite us to linger in a moment and pay attention to that moment.
And that was what I found to be really wanted to do—find literature that could help me to just occupy my everyday experiences in new ways, to see it in different perspectives, [which] would also provide the crack to allow concerns about climate change to be something that was a lively presence in my everyday existence and not something that was far in the future or somewhere far away.
Kamea Chayne: We recently welcomed Craig Santos Perez, and I know that you've engaged with his poetry as well, so I can really relate to the impact of poetry that you shared here, in terms of how they really keep you and hold you in the moment, and shift you in ways that a lot of other forms of writing haven't been able to do so for me either.
And, lyric, beyond the lyrics of a song also refers more broadly to writing which expresses the writer's emotions. And part of your focus has been on what you call a revived lyric: which you share, "is not concerned with the spotlighting of an individual “I” or the exploration of a profound psychic interior, with which the lyric is often associated, but focuses instead on the space between a first-person speaker and a second-person addressee." That would be the space between the "I" and the "you" to whomever the writing is meant for.
Why has this been of particular interest to you, and what type of impact could it implicitly or explicitly have?
Min Hyoung Song: I think the description that I provide of the lyric is this deep exploration of interiority, of a first person voice, lends itself to a kind of intimacy, like this is ground zero of what it means to be me at this moment observing this slice of an event. And so that form really is interesting to me because that really is honing attention onto the everyday, in such an intense and powerful way. And there's already so many tools and conventions that help us to try to do that, that poets have been developing for a long time. But I did not feel that an aesthetic form that leads you back to yourself and to your interiority and perhaps cuts you off from other people, was the goal of a way of reading, or way of paying attention, that was trying to address a topic like climate change, which is first and foremost a social and political problem.
So what I wanted to do was to take what lyricism is so good at, or lyrical poetry is so good at it, which is paying attention to a moment. And inviting you to sit with it, and then to connect that kind of attentiveness, to a larger social project, to a questioning about what it means to share that moment with another person. So the space between the "I" and the "you", and not just an exclusive focus on the "I". Part of what drives that move for me is this sense that, individually, there's actually very little we can do. We're not that powerful individually. Where our power comes from actually is in that space between the "I" and the "you"—that shared space.
If we could tap into that, if we can find ways of working together, to form what I called "shared agency," then we can actually gain a lot of power to affect change.
Kamea Chayne: It's really generative for me here to be led and guided to notice these subtle differences in form of the text that I engage with. I don't think I otherwise would have really noticed how different forms of speech and different ways that different content is speaking to me or engaging me or not directly engaging me, how that might lead to different impacts for me, personally, and also in addition to the different types of text that exist, and how they may shape our views and imaginations and emotions in different ways.
You've also noted as an observation that when you travel to different places, the news and angles of narratives change depending on which nation-state you're in. So there's this geographical element to changing narratives, and then there's also the algorithmic element to changing narratives, in that with our attention economy, social media and search engines also shape the landscape of what content we see based on what has, in our search history, appealed or engaged our attention the most, which would be different for each person, kind of like situating people within psychological maps that tend to further confirmation bias and affix people deeper into particular perspectives.
I'd be curious how you think the geographical narrative changes and the psychological geographical narrative changes as well—if you've thought through that—how they influence people's ways of engaging with the climate crisis and climate action, and either pose as challenges or could be understood better so we can actually not be entirely absorbed by them but use them to calibrate our perceptions of the messy reality and how we can best show up given the complexity, interconnectedness, and immensity of our socio-ecological crises.
Min Hyoung Song: One of the things I've been really interested in, as you probably can tell, is this idea of forms. There's been a revival of interest in this topic, and an expansion of what we mean by forms. Scholars like Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh in particular have really asked us to think about form as kind of principles of shaping the world around us and giving shape to that world. Forms are everywhere, they overlap, and they actually produce very specific experiences. And so I think just with that simple idea in mind, it's really interesting to think about, for instance, how our electronic mediated experiences are following algorithms that are actually guided by different formal principles.
You can think of the nation-state itself, as a form, in the ways in which algorithms might conform to the nation-state, and produce certain experiences or the ways in which marketers are always looking for targeted consumers, and trying to actually shape categories of consumers that they can target, with advertisers, and to sell their products more effectively. And that produces advertising and different kinds of media landscapes, that are shaped just on that principle alone, and the desire to produce smaller and smaller groups of people and so on and so forth, which shape and actually deform the kind of experiences we have online.
Even if you're on Twitter, I think it promises a kind of shared experience, but actually it's a very particularized and differentiated experience. Because the timeline that you are looking at is often so shaped by all of these different forms, which are shaped by desire for different uses that are independent of the user. That's an abstract way of putting it, but I hope that made sense. But I would also actually add even more, that our built landscape is increasingly also similarly shaped by all these ideas about the importance of the individual, prizing of certain private experiences. There's been a lot of discussion about this, and important discussion about the way in the U.S. in particular, especially accelerated by the pandemic, you see that people really spend a lot of time at home.
They don't even go to work as much anymore, if you're lucky enough to avoid having to expose yourself to a dangerous virus. And we've seen also increasingly a kind of attenuation of public spaces, that are neither work nor home. It's those kind of public spaces that are really important forms that knit together an urban landscape, and actually make it a vibrant place to live. Because those are places where you go to be around other people, where you can linger and spend time, and have chance encounters, and develop social occasions and so on and so forth. And those kinds of spaces are becoming fewer and fewer, and they're becoming lost to us.
All of this is to say, I think that increasingly the forms are being organized to create social experiences that lead primarily to loneliness, and [an] increased sense of isolation.
This further erodes the possibilities for developing a sense of shared experience, of collectivity, and even of solidarity, which is an enormous impediment to the very democratic politics [that] we need to address some of our most urgent concerns—climate change and environmental concerns being an important part of that.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I think that's really key to point out. That there seems to be a loss of a lot of these public spaces wherein we're being shaped to better understand the world, and how we're engaging with information. These public spaces are where people can engage with other people at a really direct and human-scale way. That, for me also feels a lot more humanizing, and that fosters greater empathy too, [in a way] that is less reductionistic and mediated by platforms that cannot properly capture the entire complex, emotional human experience.
Min Hyoung Song: Every time I'm online, or I read things about what some political leader or public figure says, that's just kind of outrageous, I find myself wondering, how can you possibly believe that about another person? But I think, as you just said, extreme beliefs about other people are possible when you never have to test them against actually being in the same space with them or interacting with them.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. So as the forms of how we consume media and information continue to shift and evolve, I think it's definitely important to lean into and try to understand how that's actually changing our culture, and changing the ways that we relate to one another and perceive the world as well.
And overall, I think an emotion that most of us can relate to is feeling a sense of overwhelm when learning about and engaging with information on global issues like climate change and their interrelated social and cultural concerns as well. And a lot of our instinctive reactions may be to try to overcome that sense of overwhelm because it's a lot and it can make us feel stuck.
But, you've named that it's important to feel overwhelmed—so that everyday denial can give way to everyday attention. Notably, in your introduction, you share: "I want to find ways to democratize agency that break the spell of powerlessness, so that thinking about climate change emboldens rather than leads to a shrinking back. … What I am calling climate lyricism refers to this self-conscious working through. It is the striving for a practice that insists, as the philosopher and activist Grace Lee Boggs insisted, that thinking should not be separated from doing.”
Can you elaborate more on the role of this feeling of overwhelm for you, and then what you mean by cultivating a practice of turning everyday denial into everyday attention?
Min Hyoung Song: I can answer this question in two ways. The first is more abstract, the second is more practical. Abstractly, I think it's maybe a mistake to say that we have a hard time dealing with unpleasant news, or really terrible events or catastrophes, even.
In some way, actually a lot of people, maybe most of us don't have a problem with that. When a crisis happens, we often snap into an attentive mode: we're really aware of the problem, and we're addressing it and we deal with it. We check in on others. In emergencies, we're actually really good. If we were in a classroom and a fire broke out, my students would get up and they'd know what to do. And they'd be really good and help each other out. And anyone who needed help getting out would be helped. We'd be really good citizens, we'd be really there for each other. So I think it's sometimes maybe misleading to say that the reason we have so much trouble thinking about climate change is because it's such an awful, awful thing that's happening, which is true perhaps to a certain degree.
But I think actually the reason that a lot of us turn away from climate change, find it really difficult to think about it, is because we feel a sense of powerlessness. Like, what's the good of thinking about it, if there's nothing we can do about it? That feeling of powerlessness is actually what encourages people to turn away, and really to occupy states of soft denial, to say, it's a problem, but then really don't do anything about it.
So we need to find ways to think about climate change, [to embolden these people], [create a sense that] there's things we can do and we need to do it and let's do it.
That sense that it's possible and that it's happening and that there are already readymade pathways for how to make a difference in your life, in your community, and at larger and larger scales. It's those grooves we have to really form and develop and encourage people to follow.
I was just actually talking to someone else about this. Years ago, when I was young and in high school, I remember that there were quite a few young people who, for ethical reasons, not always necessarily related to the environment, but to some degree, yes, said that they weren't going to eat meat anymore. They were vegetarians, and it was really difficult for them to do because every restaurant at that time would have had meat, and there were very few vegetarian options. And they would have to have these very long, complex conversations with their families, and people would complain about them being picky eaters. Fast forward several decades and that choice isn't so unusual anymore, in the United States.
There's more and more people who have gone vegetarian. You go to a restaurant and almost every restaurant makes an effort to have some vegetarian choices. There are lots of really good restaurants, at least around me, that only serve non-meat food and even people who still eat meat, who like meat, I personally eat meat myself, are all trying to eat less of it. And so it's not unusual to have like a meatless Monday, or something like that. Right. So those early people who said that they were going to become vegetarians in the United States, for ethical reasons about the treatment of animals and for whatever other reasons, created a groove that has deepened over the years. That's one minor example of how an engagement with an issue can create pathways of action that others can follow and broaden, and that finally reach scales to make a difference.
In my own personal life, I try to do as much as I can think of to make a difference, knowing that individually it really doesn't have any kind of impact on climate change, but that it does first, make me feel better about what's happening, that I'm not just being solely a passive observer, but also that they might offer occasion for thinking through the real practical problems about how to change the way we literally lead our lives, which we all have to do. I think electric cars are great, but they're not going to solve the environmental problems that are associated with transportation. A movement toward electric cars, I know, will also have to be accompanied by a shift away from individual automobility toward public transportation. So I really made an effort in my own life not to drive my car to work. I either take the train and the bus, or I walk part of the way and then take a bus, or I bike. That's been one way in which I've tried to do this practical working out in my own life.
It's also really interesting because then I start to realize, oh, there's all these practical problems with trying to just commute to work this way, that I hadn't realized before. So it's not just an intellectual issue for me. It's a very practical issue. Lots of problem-solving that I have to figure out, and hopefully could help other people figure out, if they also wanted to reduce their automobile use.
Kamea Chayne: In a talk that you contributed to titled “Do Our Lives Matter?” at Boston College, you made a statement that "Schools are being run like a business." And how it's concerning that students are taught to think of themselves as businesses as well, who need to make smart decisions about their educational choices to maximize their return on investments for the courses they take.
What did you mean by this, and more broadly, how do you think the incentives of our economic system, and what it assigns greater value to based on it being reliant on endless extractivism for profit? How might these incentives be shaping entire new generations of highly educated adults to think in certain ways, to orient their lives and values towards particular objectives, and by extension, more likely to miss out on the opportunity to gain other forms of knowledge that might not be valued by the seemingly more financially secure corporate world or even be seen as troublesome to that status quo?
Min Hyoung Song: Just as I said, there's these ordering principles, ideas that are shaping our online experiences as well as our experiences of the built environment, I think it certainly shapes our major institutions. And universities are one of those major institutions. It's remarkable to me how much the language of business has infiltrated a lot of the ways in which students will routinely talk about their educational experiences. The emphasis on efficiency, return on investment, thinking of themselves as human capital. And, how do you nurture and build that capital, invest it wisely so that you get good returns? And it's understandable, given how expensive colleges and universities have gotten.
Colleges and universities, education in general, is an incredibly labor-intensive endeavor. And I just don't see any way around it. It's not one of those endeavors that you can automate so much that you reduce the labor needs, and especially the need for very highly-skilled labor to make it work. And labor is expensive. So there's really no way that something like education could ever really be cheap. So the question is, who pays for an education? And increasingly, the answer has been the students, who are encouraged to think of themselves as consumers, who are buying a product. But there's an older idea of education, one I'm really partial to, that understands education, not on that individualistic basis, but that everyone benefits from people being educated.
Education is a social good that benefits the whole community.
When you have young people who are educated, who are highly trained professionals, who can then go off into their respective communities and do things for their communities in a way that they couldn't, if they didn't have that kind of education, that kind of background. Everyone benefits from having an educated population. I think if you take that perspective, the onus of who pays then shifts away from the individual, and more to the collective. You start to see that public education should be more funded. You see the need to help students out, and to subsidize schools, so that the cost is less. There may be less emphasis on making colleges a kind of luxurious experience, with fancy fitness centers, and so on and so forth, that will attract consumers, which is what happens when you use a consumer model for education.
So those things become less important. [It becomes more about] pouring money into things like hiring more faculty, making sure that they're trained really well to see what they're doing, the emphasis is on the quality of the education, and the quality and the support of the workers who are providing that education. That for me, that's something that is really important and increasingly lost. I wouldn't blame students who talk about their education as a return on investments, or thinking about it as an investment, because everything is set up for that. It's again, a social organization that's pressuring them into this position. But I hope even [under those] circumstances, our students can not prioritize the most practical aspects of their education, but also to take away the less tangible parts of the education, the things that will enrich their lives, that will make them more aware of their society and how we've gotten to where we are.
And that when they graduate, [to] then take what they've learned and put it to use for their communities that they're going to be involved in, their church groups, or in the city council, or in the school board, and that they're going to bring a level of sophistication and understanding based on what they learned in school, that can help build up communities, rather than constantly tear them down in the name of the individual.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. So I guess we can definitely recognize this as a systemic challenge, in that how people make choices about the practicality of their degrees might shift, if education itself were viewed and funded as a collective and social good, as opposed to an individual investment. And it's important to think about how systemically, this is disproportionately funneling a lot of people into the fields of, for example, business, because that may feel like a more practical investment in the degree, as opposed to maybe other courses and majors, that focus more on our social issues and our need to disrupt the status quo and change the existing extractive system. I think it's important not to place blame on individuals who have to do what they can, given their circumstances, and in order for people to feel a greater sense of security for their futures. [And these are] bigger picture questions for us to ponder and think through here.
We are nearing the end of our time together, but I wanted to share a quote from you here bringing back in how we dream up and imagine the future. You share: "Sustaining attention to climate change in the everyday means living without the assumption of a predetermined future. It begins with believing that nothing about what is to come is fixed and that the range of what might happen in the next few years and decades and centuries is wider, more varied, and full of more surprises than is usually thought."
With this prompt, I want to leave this space open for you to share anything else I didn't get to ask you about, as well as any other calls to action you have for our listeners that can continue to inspire us to turn everyday denial into everyday attention.
Min Hyoung Song: Thank you so much for this conversation and for so much attention to my work.
One last thought I have is that it's okay to feel bad. It's not a symptom that you've given up, but maybe just a sign that you've recognized that there are some serious challenges we're faced with. And those challenges are growing graver every day. There are lots of times when I feel just overwhelmed and sad myself, and fall into a sense of pity, I think things are just going to get really worse, and I just don't see a way out, and I can feel despairing. And I think it's okay to feel that way, because I think you are then recognizing the scale of the problem, the scale of the crisis we find ourselves in.
If you just pay attention to the news and all the extreme weather events that are happening, it's really bad and it's overwhelming. But then you can't stop there. You have to find some way because you really don't have a choice. You have to keep going.
You have to find a way to face what is really, truly awful, and figure out what you can do to make it a little bit better, and to try to work constantly, creatively with other people, on how to solve the problems that we're faced with.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Min Hyoung Song: Something that I've been writing on and that I really like is a new book of poetry by Solmaz Sharif, called Customs. It's a pretty challenging, formally abstract work, but I found it extraordinarily moving.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded, perhaps when you’re feeling overwhelmed?
Min Hyoung Song: I watch a lot of bad TV. That seems to help sometimes, when I'm really feeling overwhelmed.
Kamea Chayne: What is your greatest source of inspiration at the moment?
Min Hyoung Song: I think it's actually my father. My mother passed away this summer, and my father is 80, and struggling quite a bit. And it's really been inspirational to see how he carries on, in the face of his loss. They were together for 62 years, so you can imagine the scale of the loss for him.
Kamea Chayne: I'm sorry for your loss.
We are coming to a close here, but Min, we really appreciate your time with us here and thank you so much for joining me on the show. For now, what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?
Min Hyoung Song: Keep trying. Find your people, do what you think is best and don't let other people tell you to give up.
