Stacy Alaimo: Our bodies are the anthropocene (ep381)
“Our health and our bodies are not separate from the environment. We need to think through basically everything all at once. All of the entangled intersecting issues actually cross right through our very bodily selves, and that affects ethics, politics, and our idea of environmentalism.”
In this episode, we welcome Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English and Core Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010); and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016).
Alaimo is currently writing a book entitled Deep Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss. Her work explores the intersections between literary, artistic, political, and philosophical approaches to environmentalism along with the practices and experiences of everyday life. She loves diving and snorkeling, hiking, paddling, and creating habitat gardens with native plants.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include an introduction to “transcorporeality”, how people with “multiple chemical sensitivities” are prime examples of our deep entanglements with our extended bodies, the contributions of everyday epidemiologists and ordinary experts emerging from the environmental justice and health movements, 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 Ali Dineen
Episode-inspired artwork by Lucy Haslam
Episode references:
“Transcorporeality”, an interview with Stacy Alaimo
Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, and Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, books by Stacy Alaimo
“Producing ‘Roundup Ready®’ Communities? Human Genome Research and Environmental Justice Policy”, an article by Giovanni Di Chiro
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, a book by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
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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.
Stacy Alaimo: As a child, I grew up in a very polluted area on Lake Huron in Saginaw Bay, Michigan—a small town. I would go out there with my dog, out to the bay, and it was so dirty and polluted, no one would even go near it. So I grew up with an awareness of the ravages of the environment. And Michigan was a very racist place as well. I remember at a pretty young age being really aware of how racist a lot of my classmates were, and the stupidity of racism, and the evils of racism. All of that goes back a long time. As well as feminism—I was a feminist since I could remember being anything, and the kind of sexual harassment, even when I was a child, which was just pretty constant. And I was always an animal person. I always loved animals. I saw an episode on 60 Minutes when I was a kid about factory farms and became a vegetarian immediately when I was 13. And I loved to read, I had a real secret life of reading.
As far as entangled environmentalism, when I moved to Dallas, I got something from Greenpeace that asked us to participate in a study of how much [mercury] was in our bodies. You [would take] a chunk of your hair, and put it in this envelope and mail it to Greenpeace. And then Greenpeace mailed you back this number, this amount of [mercury], that was in your body, and then told you how it could have gotten there, like from eating tuna fish or something. So it gave you information about your own health and your own body and how things got into your body. But then it also provided ways of dealing with this, which were mainly political. There are a lot of political ways of dealing with air pollution and other issues around toxins.
I was just struck by how weird this was, because I had done a lot of protesting and political action when I was in college and graduate school, and beyond. And I thought, wow, this is so weird that I'm taking a piece of my body, putting it in an envelope, in the US mail, and then getting back this weird number, [and that I didn't know] what that number meant, or how to think about that. That really did catalyze the sense of how…
Our health and our bodies are not separate from the environment. We need to think through basically everything all at once. All of the entangled intersecting issues actually cross right through our very bodily selves, and that affects ethics and politics, and our idea of environmentalism.
Kamea Chayne: This reminds me of my recent conversation with Heather Davis, which just published, [where] she talked about how there's this geological layer of the Earth called the plastiglomerate, in which you can find plastic bits and pieces enmeshed within that geological layer, and that's sort of a reminder that even though people sort of separate plastic pollution, as this separate issue, or separate the synthetic from the "natural", it's very hard to make that neat distinction in the end, when we're able to see these elements and pieces of plastic being embodied by the body of our Earth.
To people who haven't had a chance to think much about this, it can feel like a subtle difference but I think it's a critical one nevertheless. A lot of your work challenges certain perspectives and narratives. And we'll dive deeper into the value of such philosophical shifts a little later. But as an example, popular depictions of the Anthropocene portray the narrative as humans, or if they were mindful to be a little more specific, particular groups of humans acting upon and enacting change on the external matter of the world. And, you point out how this view still suggests a separation between the supposedly more agential human sphere and the inert environment in which its actions and decisions impact and alter.
To the contrary, your theory of what you call Trans-corporeality invites the opposite. For our listeners who are just learning about Trans-corporeality for the first time, how would you introduce what it speaks to, and how does it trouble that sort of dominant, separatist perspective of the Anthropocene?
Stacy Alaimo: Great question. And I love Heather's book. It's actually in our book series at Duke University Press. So I'm a big fan of that book. And I think that that that image that you talk about there of the plastic being part of the Earth in a way, and [that] it's not separable... I think that that is really important for thinking about what's been called the "Anthropocene", from a different perspective.
In Exposed, when I critique these ideas of the Anthropocene, even though [there's] this new theory that shows how much humans have altered the planet, there's all of these what I think are delusional moves by both popular depictions of the Anthropocene and some of the theorists who, as you just summarised, are imagining that the human is somewhere else. Where else would we be? We live on this planet. But all of these imaginings visually, as if we were in a spaceship and looking down on the Earth—whoever that we is, which is super problematic with the notion of the Anthropocene—safely above, looking at the mess we've created.
And no.
With Trans-corporeality, our bodies are already the Anthropocene.
We're told this all the time. We are carrying loads of humanly-made chemicals. We're carrying various plastics and radiation in our bodies. The wildfire smoke that I'm breathing right now in Oregon, it's not just particulate matter from trees. It's also when wildfires burn people's houses. There's all kinds of chemicals. And with the cars, there's so much chemicals in that smoke. And that affects our minds, our psyches, our bodies, everything. We are physically part of this no longer completely "natural" world, that we've deeply affected.
I think that's really the starting point for environmentalism. Nobody wants to think that way because in Western culture, we like to think of the human as separate, and then nature as a so-called resource that we use however we want to use, just sitting out there waiting for us to use it to make our lives better. It's not really working out like that. It's all kind of boomeranged and it takes a lot of delusional practice to imagine that that's the case.
Kamea Chayne: Right, so we are at once part of the earth, co-creators of the earth, and products of our environments.
And one of the examples you note as being quintessential of Trans-corporeality is multiple chemical sensitivities. This is apparently a controversial issue, but in theory it names the adverse reaction people have from exposures to low levels of many common chemicals or pollutants. So, chemical sensitivity is usually understood as a reaction to various chemicals, but the contention lies in whether it should or should not be classified as an illness. Nevertheless, according to an epidemiological study by Barbara A. Sorg, about 4% of people in the U.S. suffer from severe MCS, and as many as 15-30% experience less severe cases.
Now, because this is something that isn't very well understood, I would question whether that number of people being affected by these various toxins and pollutants should be even higher just because a lot of people might not even know the sources of their more minor symptoms of being unwell, not sick enough to be hospitalized or to seek medical help but still having their optimal functioning or daily quality of life compromised.
To these points, how do you see multiple chemical sensitivities and people who are more chemically reactive as a prime example of entanglement and enmeshment, showing that people and what's considered the personal cannot be neatly siloed from the political, the environmental, the external?
Stacy Alaimo: I think that probably a lot more people are affected by chemicals on a daily basis. If anyone has ever, say, gotten a headache from someone else's cologne or perfume or cleaning chemicals, then you're on the spectrum of multiple chemical sensitivity. I think at some end of that spectrum, everybody is on there, because we're all affected by these things, probably to varying degrees. And I don't know that the science knows exactly the mechanisms here, because it's very complicated.
But it's shocking to me how many things are normalized in the culture, that are so toxic. For example, if I go into a Home Depot store or Lowe's store, or something like that, I can't go anywhere near that lawn chemical area. I can smell it a few aisles away, and I get nauseous, and a headache, and it's very bad. And, of course, one of the issues with chemical sensitivity that I talk about in the book, is this really weird relationship to privilege and class. This great science studies scholar classifies it as one of these illnesses you have to "fight to get", meaning because it's not recognized as a real illness, that then you learn about it through various activist groups or other means, but it takes a kind of not education necessarily, but a real access to various resources to try to even make sense of what's happening to you.
And then on the other side of that, which Todd Haynes' film "Safe", portrayed really beautifully, because the protagonist who was fighting to get, so to speak, MCS, Julianne Moore's character, is sitting comfortably in her lovely living room. Meanwhile, the Latinx workers, household workers, who are cleaning the silverware and other things with toxic chemicals, of course, they're more exposed. So by virtue of class, there are many people who are much more exposed to these chemicals, and probably are having mixed reactions, but really just don't have the luxury of pursuing it.
One of the most interesting things, I think, in terms of environmental history, is that even though we relate the modern environmental movement to Rachel Carson's, Silent Spring, before that, there were Mexican-American, other Latinx, and then other various ethnicities of farmworkers, who were interviewed mainly about labor issues, and things, not about this, and they kept saying, look, these chemicals we work with, they're making us sick and they're making something wrong with our babies, and they're having all these effects on us. They kept repeating this, even though that was not what they were "supposed" to be talking about.
One of the things that I think is so striking about MCS, is your whole body becomes an experiment. You're moving through the world, or you're on your job, and things are affecting you, and you have to figure that out.
And it's not "normal", because “normal" is to just imagine that each of us is safely within our own bodies. And that there's some kind of barrier between us and the rest of the world, and that we're safe in there, and that none of these things affect us. You really risk being called crazy if you say that soap in the staff bathroom is really giving me horrible headaches. People would look at you strange, and maybe give you a hard time.
We're not supposed to notice these things. And I think capitalism depends on that. Capitalism depends on us thinking that everything we buy is going to do only what it's supposed to do. It's this perfect entity, this perfect object that will do its thing and not do anything bad, and that it's not part of us, it's just serving us. We have that idea that nature is here to serve us, objects are here to serve us. And it doesn't work that way because we're very much physically part of this world that we've created, better and worse. So much—our mental health, our physical health, the environmental health—depends on recognizing that.
Kamea Chayne: And what really concerns me and I think you were just speaking to this as well, is that there seems to be this cultural gaslighting going on that people's ailments or lack of ability to 'perform' or work at our optimal states, are often individualized rather than understood as contextual and systemic. Or that some of people's very real adverse reactions to toxins and pollutants are brushed off as psychological or from their own personal health choices.
I wonder if part of the controversy around multiple chemical sensitivities comes from how difficult it is to standardize and universalize people's different reactions, because no two cases of multiple chemical sensitivities can ever be the same. Just like how mushrooms synthesize and are the products of their unique environments and exposures, so our are bodies in reacting to and reflecting the unique environments and conditions that we are in. Because the socio-ecological configuration and concoction of possible toxins around us are all going to be different.
So, I wonder if much of the difficulty to validate MCS as a legitimate condition comes from the fact that the scientific method itself seeks to isolate and de-contextualize, with goals of coming up with replicable, repeatable, and generalizable findings, and how it views the ability to universalize findings as indicative of greater credibility and reliability.
What else you would add here, given your stance that “we need the human imagination to enliven and contextualize scientific information that discloses otherwise invisible processes and effects?”
Stacy Alaimo: I really agree with everything that you said there. I do think that part of the problem has to do with the way that science wants all of our bodies to be seen as the same, and the cause and effect relations to be obvious and one-dimensional and not actual bodies, that have had different traumas, different experience and different sorts of chemical loads in them.
To go back to the gaslighting that you talked about, the whole idea that people could criticize those with multiple chemical sensitivity, for it being all in their head is so absurd, when you think that this is a culture in which there are many, many psychopharmaceuticals that are meant to affect our moods, our psyches—all of these drugs that are basically these tiny little bits of particular chemicals in a drug to change your psychology, and yet…
Why wouldn't our immersion within all of these toxins also do various things to us?
So on the one hand, we believe that these chemicals can affect us in positive ways, and then on the other hand, people who are experiencing MCS supposedly are just making it up in their head.
Giovanni Di Chiro has a great essay, [“Producing ‘Roundup Ready®’ Communities? Human Genome Research and Environmental Justice Policy”], about how some industries were actually trying to test their workers, and do genetic analyses on their workers, so that they could figure out which workers, based on their genes, would be better suited for really toxic jobs. So it completely shifts the blame onto the workers, like, well, sorry, you have a faulty body, I guess there's something wrong with you, and you can't have this job—which is probably a relatively high-paying blue-collar job, because it has an element of risk and danger. Just imagine that: not thinking that there's something wrong with the fact that all of these toxic, dangerous chemicals are being produced, but that then you're going to go so far as to blame people for [having] bodies [that are] not up to the task of producing these toxic things.
It's so right out of some dystopian science fiction, it's really unbelievable. Blaming the individual, blaming us either because we're crazy, or blaming us for our bodies not being good enough. That kind of hyper-ableism there, instead of thinking, how can we make a world that is less harmful to all people and all living creatures?
Kamea Chayne: Right. It seems quite concerning that the takeaway seems to be, how do we get people who are less sensitive to confront and work with these very toxic chemicals, rather than how do we actually make this a healthier environment for everybody who works here?
And besides troubling the lens of universality and objectivity, I also wonder about the institutional bias disproportionately validating certain types of knowledge and not others. And, to preface this, every researcher individually has their realms of interest, their hypotheses they want to test to deepen their and our collective knowledge. And I think this curiosity and thirst and humility to learn is wonderful. So, this is not at all to demonize individual inquiries.
But at a more systemic level, I think it's important to recognize that a lot of research requires funding from somewhere in order to be carried out. So I question whether there are invisibilized forces such as philanthropy or government funding or technocratic institutions disproportionately backing certain types of research, while disproportionately not valuing other types of research, or even deeming them as not scientific.
In other words, I’m thinking about the negative space here—as in what has been left out? What forms of knowledge and ways of knowing have been systemically sidelined without opportunities to even be validated and then incorporated into the teachings of academic institutions? And whose knowledge has immense potential to help us better understand our public and planetary ailments, but who may have been dismissed as not reliable sources of information?
To these points, I would love it if you could speak more about the alternative contributions of popular epidemiologists and ordinary experts that have emerged from environmental justice and health movements.
Stacy Alaimo: All of that is so important, and I think one of our tasks right now, just to give another frame to the importance of this, in the post-COVID era and then also with climate change, this idea that science is something you just believe in or don't believe in—you believe in COVID and the vaccine or you don't, or you believe in climate change and you don't—that is really problematic. We can't go back to just a simple idea, which many people have done, I believe, that science is science. It's always right. It always shows us everything we need to know.
That is so simplistic, and doesn't get to the fact that science is a process. Science reveals really important aspects of the world, but it is a process. And like you're saying, it can be deeply affected by economic processes, ideology, all sorts of things. There are forces that do not want certain scientific research to be done, and there are forces that have a lot of funding that want other scientific research to be done. And Robert Proctor summed it up perfectly, in the title of his huge book called Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know And Don't Know About Cancer. Clearly, the chemical industry does not does not want a lot of research done on which chemicals are carcinogenic or endocrine disruptors, or anything else. That's just, of course, in their best interest that that information does not get out, that science isn't funding.
It's really important for all of us to be able to have this way of thinking about the factual accounts within science, but then also the science that isn't done, and what we don't know and what we could know. When I was writing Bodily Natures, I was shocked that, at that time, anyway, the EPA—it's not like the EPA just magically keeps us all safe, certainly that's not happening, but they—depended on what we'd call ordinary experts, or citizen scientists, to actually track and do this work of figuring out if some kind of toxic contamination was happening. The people who do this kind of work are really, really amazing. A quintessential example would be something like a parent realizing that, wow, there are a lot of children at this particular school who are showing up with the same kind of brain cancer, [and asking] how could that happen?
And you imagine [that] a lot of people who aren't scientists and maybe who have never even been to college, trying to figure out how is it that these children are suddenly getting the same form of cancer. [Asking,] how do we document it, are we sampling the water, are we taking medicals? How does this work? How do you go about dealing with that? It's such an amazing feat that so many environmental justice activists have managed to do this work in community groups, often without the help of any experts in the field.
Everybody in this country owes a lot to these people who are mainly unnamed.
And we hardly have any names for these people even that come to mind. I think that there is a real sort of missing presence, and people that we should we should really celebrate.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And I do think it's really important to go beyond the simplistic frame of, I believe this and I don't believe this, because there's just so much more nuance. If we think about a lot of the information wars going on, things labeled as misinformation or disinformation, I think there's a lot of politics in that as well, and that sometimes a lot of things are labeled as conspiracies when there actually could be elements of truth in that, or if it could even be true but just be dismissed as conspiracy, because those who have the "greater voice", does not want whatever truth to be found out.
And maybe this is controversial, but I think there are almost, almost always elements of truth in even different conspiracies, because I think the root of that is people feeling like something doesn't really feel right, and maybe they land on a conclusion that isn't necessarily the truth, but I think there's still something to be learned from leaning into those theories and seeing what are the roots of why people are so fascinated or so fixated on trying to come to a reason why whatever has happened, or something like that.
Stacy Alaimo: If you think about history and you think about something like the horrors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the Black men who were imprisoned, and carried out horrible experiments on, if someone had just heard about that, they might think that that was a conspiracy theory, [even though] actually, it happened. So I agree with you.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And so I think being able to see this institutional bias of scientific research is really important. Because, to start, the lens of objectivity and de-contextualization itself has limitations, as we mentioned, and on top of that, the types of research that get funded to be carried out and therefore the validated information available to the public gets skewed by the interests of those with disproportionate levels of research funding to give. So, again, not negating what we have learned but noticing the negative space.
I think the implications of this are large. We cannot make laws and regulations and recommendations for personal and ecological health if we do not even have a full understanding of its complexities and various facets. So this leads us to the question of, what happens if the forces of extraction are already going to destroy and disrupt ecosystems that researchers haven't even had the chance to learn about enough yet?
I would appreciate it if you could lead us into your inquiries and most top-of-mind thoughts you've been processing as you work on your book about deep sea creatures, empathy exhaustions, and the destructive impacts of deep sea mining or bottom-trawling industrialized fishing.
Stacy Alaimo: One of the things that I began thinking about when I turned to working on deep sea creatures was how is it even possible to try to extend environmental concern all the way to the bottom of the sea? Because I do think people are in this in this state of exhausted empathy, and just exhaustion just generally. There are so many crises that everybody is dealing with right now. Even if we're not dealing with them, they're lurking there and vexing people in various ways. So I took this thought of these deep sea creatures, who are getting a lot of publicity aesthetically. So they circulate a lot of portraits of new deep sea creatures that have been discovered. And they're very weird looking, or they're really beautiful, and they circulate on the Internet in various ways. There's something just so stunning about them.
But I'm also really suspicious of this whole idea of, it's almost this anachronistic sense of discovery, like a 19th century or 18th century or 17th century sense of discovery. And one of the things that I think is suspicious about that, is this nostalgia for a time when especially white Western settler colonialists could just like "innocently" discover things. And it's like, well, these are at the bottom of the sea, so they don't really belong to anyone, so we don't have that problem anymore, of colonialism, and it's just there they are and we can discover them. There's something really disturbing about that. That does come out, I think, in people like James Cameron's Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, and these other very masculinist explorers, like Vescovo, and others [for whom] it's about the heroics of it all.
What makes me interested in the deep sea creatures, [are these] weird paradoxes, especially of the Anthropocene, that on the one hand, human activities such as deep sea mining, overfishing, industrialized overfishing and trawling, dumping of garbage, including plastic pollution, radioactive pollution, acidification, the warming of the oceans, even the noise—all of these things are really affecting marine ecosystems, even at the bottom of the sea.
There have to be, and this is the figure that haunts me, so many deep sea creatures that humans have rendered extinct that we don't even know what they are like.
It only stands to reason because we've changed so much in the ocean, and harmed so many creatures and taken so many out, that there are creatures who are extinct and that we will never know who they are.
But then also just this question, how—if we can't even seem to have environmental protections for areas that are close to human where we actually live, for areas that we see, that we love, that we're in—in the world can we ever extend environmental concern to the deep seas, where nobody is on watch, nobody is there, nobody cares about it, really, except some people. So that I've taken that as one of my motivating questions. And the only thing that really is motivating people is basically the visual images of these creatures, so in a kind of aesthetic appreciation of them, as beautiful and worthy of concern.
And that seems, in a way, pun intended, shallow and superficial. But then the other animal studies say with dogs, has to do with them being companion species, in Haraway's famous phrase, and our interactions with them and our relationships with them, or say, with all of the other primates. The fact that we're so closely related to other primates—those are all about interrelation and kinship and proximity. But how do you provoke concern for these creatures that are [seemingly] in another world? Their world is so different, and they are being harmed, but we have so little knowledge of it.
And when we were talking about science and funding, of course, it's extremely expensive to do any research in the deep seas because there's so many formidable obstacles. But we don't know how crucial deep sea habitats and ecosystems and creatures are to the global ocean ecosystems—ultimately…
Everything is interconnected in various ways.
Kamea Chayne: This just leaves me with a lot more questions than answers. And maybe that's the point here, is that there's still so much that we don't yet understand. What we do know is that when we destroy things that we don't yet understand, then we don't even know what we're losing or what the consequences of that will be.
And finally, to weave everything that we've explored here together, in terms of Trans-corporeality and this technoscientific framing of sustainability, into the bigger picture, you talk about how you think capitalism wants us to think of commodities as being objects that are completely contained—that they've been created by corporations to do what they're supposed to do, without having effects or agencies of their own.
What more do you think is important to bring into this conversation here, especially as we underscore the deeply political nature of sustainability which is centered on our collective and planetary wellbeing, and also the need to critique the broader social and economic systems and their underlying philosophies and cultural values?
Stacy Alaimo: What I would like to conclude with in terms of a call to action is for people to resist the way in which environmentalism has been almost solely focused on climate change and climate change being only about humans. It's the same problem all over again, like there's a problem for humans, and we have to solve it for humans. No, that's not how environmentalism works. You have to think of interdependencies, interrelationships.
I do see that the popularized versions of climate change all focus on humans, to the exclusion of everything else. They're extremely anthropocentric, going back many years ago to Bill McKibben's 350.org group—it was completely anthropocentric. And at that moment I thought, wow, environmentalism now is only about humans. And that's disturbing to me. So I would really like people to think about the more complex interrelations between climate change and other issues, such as environmental justice, which also is about humans and climate justice, also about humans, but, as well, the sixth great extinction, which you hardly ever hear about, all of these species being lost and lost forever.
And then the reasons for this loss of species? Climate change is one of the factors, but also habitat loss, drought, chemicals, overfishing, agricultural systems, all sorts of things that are destroying species every day. We need a more rich and complicated notion of what environmentalism is. And you can see it negatively, because we do have all of these issues to contend with. But the positive side of that is, that every one of us politically, socially, in our everyday practices, in our art, in our thinking, all kinds of ways—every one of us can have some kind of positive impact in some of those areas. There's so many opportunities to do something.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Stacy Alaimo: A book that's relatively new that I absolutely love is Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Who would have put those two things together? The book is absolutely brilliant. She voices this love for the animals directly, in this really passionate and unnerving way. It's full of history. It's full of culture. It has all of these practices. It's like a workbook. It's a manifesto, it's a call to action. It's so many things. I just love this book.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Stacy Alaimo: I meditate every morning and I meditate outside on my front porch. And I've planted all of these plants for the hummingbirds, so I meditate out there with my two dogs and with the hummingbirds all around me. And they're drinking from the plants I planted. It's just a beautiful way to start the day. But also, since I moved here just before COVID, I was trapped here during COVID, I have been turning both of my lawns into native habitats mainly for the birds, the bees, the butterflies, the snakes, other insects. I'm really trying to create as much of a rich, beautiful habitat as I can for other creatures in my yard.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Stacy Alaimo: The political movements that are happening, in all different areas, from trans and non-binary peoples, environmental activism, Indigenous activism and Indigenous environmentalism. All of that. And then less overtly political, the people who just quietly do their things, like habitat restoration or other practices that would get overlooked, but that are also really inspirational.
Kamea Chayne: Stacy, thank you so much for joining me on the show today and for this really enriching and thought-provoking conversation. For now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Stacy Alaimo: Green dreaming needs not only to be envisioned. The envisioning is important, but practice. So I don't advocate hope. I know that's controversial. I don't really advocate hope, because I see it as a disconnect from reality. And so instead of ricocheting between hope and despair, I would say commit yourself to specific environmental and political practices that you think will make a difference.
