Vanessa Raditz: Queering resilience amidst climate disasters (ep339)
“The flip side of vulnerability is resilience. Histories of marginalization and oppression are simultaneously histories of survival, resistance, and resilience—that are all so embedded within communities that are often called ‘vulnerable.’”
What does it mean to queer resilience in the face of climate catastrophes? And how might the dominant modes of disaster relief reinforce the centralized systems predicated on extraction and exploitation?
In this episode, we welcome Vanessa Raditz, a queer biocultural geographer, educator, and storyteller dedicated to community healing, opening access to land and resources, and fostering a thriving local economy based on ecological resilience. They are a chronic academic, a current PhD student, a founding member of the Queer Ecojustice Project, a co-organizer of #Queers4ClimateJustice, and the director of the film “Fire & Flood: Queer Resilience in the era of Climate Change”.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Fallen Stars by Desmond White
Episode-inspired artwork by Danii Pollehn
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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.
Vanessa Raditz: One person in particular that I've been thinking about a lot recently is Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan woman who founded the Green Belt Movement and received the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. So I was in Kenya when I was 15 to 18. I was there with my family. My mother does international public health work, and I was I was just a high schooler. But at that point, I'd already been engaged in some bits of environmental work. But it was really through learning about Wangari Maathai’s work and getting to participate in some tree planting with her that things started to really click for me.
I began to understand the ways in which social injustices globally are connected also to the way that we treat the Earth, and that, in particular, capitalism and globalized neoliberalism has negatively impacted both people, particularly women and people of color around the world, and also robbed people around the world of the kinds of Earth-based livelihoods that have allowed us to evolve as a species for 50,000 years. So I want to acknowledge that as a major turning point for me.
At that point in time, I'd already been out as bi for a couple of years. I came out pretty early and I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and had a very affirming community. Actually, my pastor at church, the United Church of Christ, was my first lesbian mentor or person that I looked up to, and my church experience was also my entry point to environmentalism, if I'm to be honest. I'm very lucky in that regard, as Christian churches and other monotheistic transcendent religions have been some of the drivers of our disconnection from land and from each other.
But in my case, the United Church of Christ has been involved in the environmental justice movement really since its founding. It was back in late middle school that I read their report on the location of toxic waste facilities and people of color communities that was published in the late 80s. It was actually through that spiritual community that I got involved. We did a boycott of Taco Bell in solidarity with the Immokalee workers, so I learned about farmworker rights, and it was also the place where I learned that it's not just OK to be queer, but it can be and is revered and holy. From a very young age, I understood that you could be a leader and a beloved leader of community.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing and offering a glimpse into your background and what really solidified or helped to inspire the work that you do today. We had explored the concept of biocultural diversity before with Terralingua’s Dr. Luisa Maffi, which, to our listeners who haven't listened to that conversation, she defined biocultural diversity as recognizing the aligning trends of biodiversity loss, cultural diversity loss, and language diversity loss, and seeing them not as coincidental, but because they're all intricately connected and place-based, so severing those relationships and knowledge compromises all of them.
And Vanessa, I know that you are in part, a biocultural geographer. I'm curious what this has meant for you in terms of how you understand geography and place and what alternate perspectives on our climate and ecological crisis it has invited you to consider.
Vanessa Raditz: This has been one of the most intriguing concepts for me to try and bring not only into environmental work, I think that I'm going to have to go back and listen to that conversation that you had with Luisa Maffi, but I think that it's been brought into conservation work in really important ways that promote the leadership of Indigenous communities and particularly the sovereignty and land rematriation that is necessary for the global conservation of our biocultural diversity, our resources for resilience.
I think one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is how to bring that framework to the queer and trans movement. I think that we as queer people have been so distanced from nature. I had a really lucky experience with the church that I grew up in, but I know so many people whose experiences with the church were some of the moments of deepest trauma, with people that they loved and looked up to saying that they were unnatural, that they were crimes against nature.
So there's there's been a long tradition in queer scholarship and in the LGBTQ movement to, you know, if they're going to call us unnatural, we don't want anything to do with nature and we're going to really thrive in this realm of the cultural and cultural productions. We have done so much amazing work within that realm...
But what biocultural diversity also offers is a way of coming home to a deeper part, I'd even say a spiritual essence of the innate diversity of life.
So if we're thinking about the queer ecologies literature and biological exuberance, the idea of the vast variability of gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, kinship systems, all of these different ways of organizing society. There's just an enormous diversity among non-human life and also among humans as we've evolved in this intimate relationship with place since the beginning of human existence.
I think that reimagining a queerness and a radical queer positionality that one, understands our intimate relationship with land, and two, is aligned with Indigenous sovereignty and land rematriation, recognizing that two-spirit people have been revered in Indigenous communities and have had many different kinds of roles that are important for us to learn from in this time. So the work that we can do as queer and trans people to support Indigenous sovereignty is key to our liberation and is key to any kind of livable future on this planet.
Kamea Chayne: This really reminds me of something I've been thinking about, which is the severences that we've created and how we've disassociated ourselves. So this creation of the binary of man and nature and as you alluded to, this severance between culture and ecology, where culture and society or society and ecology or culture and ecology are seen as separate things. When if we were to go deeper into their roots, there is culture in ecology and there are social relationships and there are societies within Earth's every social and ecological system.
Vanessa Raditz: Absolutely. Actually, in that book that I just cited from Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, he writes about that specifically. He's not trying to turn to queerness in animals as some way of saying look, there's some kind of a biological or a DNA kind of origin story for queerness. No, he's writing about a biocultural diversity that, even if we're looking at sexual behavior among primates, we're not looking at something that's only genetically driven, that we are as living beings, constantly in interaction with our surrounding environments, both living and non-living animate beings.
So I think that is really helpful for me in trying to relocate myself as a queer person, not just to claim that I belong among humans, but that I belong among living things, that I don't need to search for a gay gene or some kind of physiological proof that I am OK or that I'm a legitimate being. But no, we are always in a constant process of mutual change and evolution. I think that that is really important for queer and trans movements to understand because...
What I love about queer theory and the queer community is this willingness to one, question what has been normalized, and two, to imagine how to be outside of the logics of this dominant control culture that so many of us were raised within.
Also, I think rooting this idea of vast variabilities within the biocultural diversity of the world also grounds us in what kinds of liberatory futures are also possible on this planet in the current state of harm. So I'm a graduate student at the University of Georgia right now, I'm getting my Ph.D. in geography, and I've been writing about exactly this. A big part of it was trying to go back to understand the way that eco-feminists made some of these connections between the separation of humans from nature, man from women, and these dueling dualisms that set up harm to bodies and land.
But in the ways in which they would refer to Indigenous people and particularly non-cis, heterosexual Indigenous people, it was often in a really appropriated way that would use this anthropological term of a “berdache,” which is a really kind of an outsider term that mostly was a word created by colonists to describe the the nonsense heteronormative kinds of genders and sexualities that they saw among the Indigenous people of North America when they arrived.
So in excavating some of that memory, one, it's important to to lift that up, but we can't just look back and say, “Oh, that Lhamana amongst Zuni people doesn't mean trans because they didn't have the same ideas of men and women that are foundational to the concept of a transgender identity.” Right?
Instead of imposing these modern, contemporary terms on the relationships that Indigenous people had prior to colonization and and are still continuing to uplift within their their own cultural resurgence. It's more important not to look back and say, oh, there were gay people on the North American continent before colonization. It's more important to say that the cis-hetero-patriarchy as a system is a colonial invention.
For us as queer and trans people to create a future on this planet, we need to be fighting those very systems that our ancestors imported to this land. That is the kind of queer liberation movement, in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty and land rematriation, that will allow our survival and the survival of all the queer and trans, biologically exuberant living things on the planet.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, it almost sounds like an invitation to not just redefine these different labels based on the language and frameworks we have today, but almost to undefine them, in a sense.
Vanessa Raditz: Yeah, and when it comes to various queer Indigenous identities, I think respecting what people in the communities are currently doing. Because I think that was the other major issue with the way that eco-feminists and even some queer ecologies scholars talk about it. They kind of appropriate this history as their own in order to advance social justice movements that predominantly benefit white queer and trans people using the memory of pre-colonial queer Indigenous people instead of recognizing that history and working in solidarity with the queer Indigenous people that continue to be at the forefront of ecological justice work today.
Kamea Chayne: Perhaps to help illustrate these points with more recent and present examples in the film you directed, Fire and Flood: Queer Resilience in the Era of Climate Change, you explore three levels of vulnerability. Can you shine some light on these different layers of discrimination, which I think are very instructive in terms of helping us understand the different levels of transformation that we need if we want to create a world which truly cares for and honors all beings?
Vanessa Raditz: Fire and Flood is a story of the near simultaneous disasters in the fall of 2017. It began with my personal experience of living through the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, which started at the same time as 13 other fires across the region. The day before those fires had started, I had been in a series of really deep and beautiful conversations with some queer and femme folks from Puerto Rico who were raising money and collecting seeds and solar panels and things like that to send back to the island to support the resilience of kinds of regenerative communities that were supporting each other in the immediate wake of disaster.
So it was from those deep conversations that I immediately plunged into the fires and the kinds of experiences that I had, just based on my own identities, moving back and forth across the landscape to harvest produce on local farms to bring to pop-up kitchens and distribution centers. And also, I'd formerly been a mentor at an LGBTQ center in Santa Rosa. So once they were able to reopen, I went back in there and basically was just sitting with the youth as they'd come in. Sometimes folks would come in during the day from the shelters, just for a space where they could process and vent what they were experiencing.
After that, I was like, “I think that these stories need to be heard. These stories need to be talked about,” particularly in the queer and trans community, because like I said, this distance from the Earth, this distance from nature, I think, has also led to a distance from really fully understanding the precarious position that we're in and being involved in climate justice and being involved in resilience work. So that's the goal of this film, to create a cultural object that queer and trans communities can use to hold these conversations and to start planning and preparing for resilience.
Some of the multiple levels of vulnerability that I've been thinking about—and I think the word vulnerability is so charged—I just want to say when I use that term, I'm always recognizing that the flipside of vulnerability is resilience because histories of marginalization and oppression are simultaneously the histories of survival and resistance and resilience that are also embedded within communities that are often called “vulnerable.” So I want to preface with that. But, you know, given the kind of public health background I come from, vulnerability is the term of the field of disaster risk reduction.
So the three main forms of vulnerability that I've been thinking about are the individual or interpersonal. This is like if you’re in a shelter where you're with perhaps someone of a fundamentalist religious belief system. Disaster management, especially since the beginning of neoliberalism and all of the disinvestment in our public services, most disaster response work is done by religious organizations. So if you're a young queer or trans person in a shelter, that is one way in which discrimination happens—this kind of direct, interpersonal violence from people who don't believe that you should exist or have access to the kinds of services that they provide. There are stories from around the country of people being denied access to shelters, trans women being arrested for using the showers of their genders, and just generally different kinds of interpersonal discrimination.
Then there's also institutional discrimination. So that includes the laws and policies that make it so that that kind of individual discrimination can continue without any repercussions. So this looks like the lack of protections within the nondiscrimination policies within FEMA and these other organizations.
Then the last one, that I focus on the most, is structural vulnerabilities, which are the kinds of inequities that come from this long history of bias and discrimination that have set up inequalities in the queer and trans communities before these disasters even happen. So this looks like the really high rates of poverty and disability and homelessness, chronic illness, mental-neurodivergence, and importantly, incarceration. One in two black trans women will have been incarcerated at some point in their lives, and that's, you know, that's a result of interpersonal discrimination and also because of all of these other—because of the way that poverty has been criminalized, because of the way that homelessness is criminalized, because of our lack of access to mental health resources that all together put people in cages.
All of those structural vulnerabilities, inequities that exist before a disaster happens put queer and trans communities at disproportionate risk for death and extreme hardship.
Those kinds of things, until very recently, have not been acknowledged within the disaster risk reduction field. I was just in a webinar yesterday where FEMA, for the very first time, spoke directly to this question of disaster, vulnerability, and queer and trans communities. So there's some shifting in that institutional level of vulnerability. But I don't think we need to wait on their leadership. I really think that, like I said, the history of vulnerability is simultaneously a history of resilience.
There is so much creative wisdom for living otherwise and caring for each other within disabled communities, within communities who have been in and out of carceral settings—people are amazingly resourceful.
So I think that as a queer and trans community being dedicated to climate justice means really investing in the leadership of the folks who have been set up for social death within our system and nevertheless have found a way to survive. I think that those are the creative solutions that we most desperately need right now.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I think disaster relief can feel like a sensitive topic to critique because one may feel that there is still the reality that in times of emergency and urgent threats, perhaps any form of relief, no matter who it comes from, is going to support the survival of whoever the aid can reach. But I guess if we were to zoom out and take a step back, how might these disaster relief efforts be a part of or even reinforce greater systems of injustices, especially when they aren't oriented toward supporting long-term, community-based resilience?
Vanessa Raditz: Absolutely. I mean, just in Santa Rosa, one thing that we noticed was the fires were happening in the peak harvest season and all of these local farms were just donating everything they had, but there was not a mainstream mechanism by which they could get reimbursed for all those donations. Meanwhile, Salvation Army would have these massive contracts for companies like Kellogg and Cargill, and Perdue, so they're bringing in all of this industrial, produced food to Santa Rosa in the middle of Sonoma County.
This is like the birth of the slow food local food movement in the United States, among the bougie foodies, right? Like we got some food, we had some produce. Those local farmers did not have an easy mechanism for getting reimbursed. Meanwhile, industrial agriculture has these longstanding connections and they are getting paid for kind of offloading what's often food that they might not have been able to to sell. So I think that that's one of the things that we need to look at...
Our current system for disaster relief is highly centralized and highly militarized, so it's better equipped to support a general "normal" population, which by its definition, excludes communities at the margins, and their creative alternatives for how we can remake our world.
They're not going to be included. I think that mutual aid is created like this. That's what this is all about, really. At the end of the day, during these moments of disaster, you see an enormous uptick in people caring for each other, these pop-up food clinics. We've seen that through COVID pandemic.
But one of the questions that I keep having is if we're an anti-racist movement, we're really focused on moving towards reparations. How do we use these systems, these infrastructures that we already have like FEMA to be able to do the mass scale reallocation of resources towards local community response so that we're not always just having to do our response on a wish and a prayer and this year's lost harvest income, but the kind of funding that's currently going to Perdue and Cargill is going to your local community farm is going directly to the Indigenous nation that is running its own health programs, right? So I think that is the way that we have to use these systems that currently exist.
I think it's important to build the alternative and to fight the bad at the same time. Part of that means moving the resources that are already within this infrastructure and moving them towards what we are trying to grow.
Kamea Chayne: I'm not sure if I can articulate this well, but from what I've learned, decentralized systems are generally a lot more resilient. They're less vulnerable to something going wrong and the entire system essentially collapsing because they're reliant on that one part. And on the flip side, I think some people may argue that centralized systems are more efficient. Therefore, in the case of disaster relief, they may be more capable of getting resources to those who are the most in need. So I wonder if that's a misconception that we might be able to deconstruct. I don't know if you've thought about this.
Vanessa Raditz: Definitely. I definitely come with an ethic of transition, which is like, we're going to need an assortment of all of it, and it's over time, we're trying to move towards feeding and growing the things that we want. But I think in the meantime, you know, let's recognize that yes, we have this system that can provide massive amounts of cheap, empty calories that come from the harm to farmworkers and land. Yeah, OK. Let's take it. We got this. Yes. And let's think about where we want to go and how do we build the social infrastructure that we're going to need in order to do this differently.
It really isn't always the case that this is more efficient when you really think about it, it has been socially constructed to be more efficient, to grow corn in the way that we do. It's not actually the most efficient. When you think about sustainable earth systems that will have any kind of longevity, it's actually very inefficient and that's why we have soil degradation around the world.
But even if we're thinking about efficiency in the way that it is often used, you can just look at something like the disaster of Hurricane Maria, by which I don't mean the hurricane. The hurricane was a hurricane. Caribbean islands have been hit by hurricanes since there were islands in the Caribbean.
It's the social construction of our built environment and our social infrastructure that creates disasters.
One of the things that we saw in Puerto Rico was because of this imperial-colonial relationship with the United States, they couldn't even receive aid from the Dominican Republic. Just like a little boat across to the next island over. They couldn't receive the aid unless it went to mainland United States and then came back to Puerto Rico, and that's because of this imperial relationship, which is a system of concentration and centralization of power.
So if you want to look at that on a mass scale, yeah, these centralized systems are very inefficient. Well, they're very efficient if you are a person who is valued within that imperial system, if you are a white, upper class, or affluent person. Yeah, that system was made for you. But it is very inefficient. It is purposefully not made to protect people who have been condemned to social death, people of color, queer and trans people, people who are considered disposable around the world. The system was actually created off of the exploitation of people of color and the social death of queer and trans people.
That's important to remember—that efficiency should not be our goal. Our goal really needs to be community, wellness, and regeneration of the land and the social infrastructure that has been destroyed through centuries of gendered racial capitalism.
And regenerating that power within communities and within communities rooted in land, to care for themselves and for each other. That is what's most efficient. So whatever we can do to support that local process of people being able to be self-sufficient is going to be the longer-term kinds of solutions that will allow the most people to survive.
Kamea Chayne: I think what necessarily comes with centralization is the homogenization of all forms of diversity, and so if we're talking about honoring and regenerating biocultural diversity, as we recognized earlier on, that inherently is tied with decentralization and community-based resilience. So I love that this is coming full circle.
There is a powerful quote from the film which noted: "The system as it exists cannot last. Not just that it will collapse, but that collapse is all around us if we look at it. The question is: what kind of society can we build by catching and repurposing the collapse of these empires?"
So as the frontline communities globally disproportionately face more disasters and climate crisis-driven disasters, and as more of the literal and metaphorical infrastructures of modern societies collapse and crumble, what have you witnessed of the resilience and creativity stemming from the queer and other historically harmed communities?
Vanessa Raditz: This brings me back to what I was talking about at the beginning. I think that these are some kind of seeds planted in me by her that I've finally been able to tend. I finally realize they're there and they've been growing in my mind for the past 13 years.
The work that she was doing with the Green Belt Movement was exactly this. Climate change is nothing new in Kenya. The kinds of droughts that have been linked to deforestation are intricate issues of climate change. Her solution for that has been to empower local women to plant trees and an early decision they made was not to give people seeds but to teach them how to identify and grow the seeds from the trees that were already in their areas.
That level of rerooting ecological knowledge and decentralization, and it's through that reconnecting to land and place and regenerating local ecosystems, that rural Kenyan women were able to recreate dignified livelihoods and participate in the political process of pushing back against the neo-liberalization of their government. Without having the basis for survival, there's no way to participate in that system.
Those are some of the seeds that were planted in me. Now when I look at moments of disaster and speak with queer and trans communities that are involved in mutual aid and regenerative ways of caring for each other in the aftermath, I see similar things. I want to be really clear that queer and trans people, when they're engaging in these projects, aren't just only supporting other queer and trans people.
I think that's actually a major trap in our contemporary LGBTQ movement is to only be providing resources or focusing on policy that impacts our immediate community. Because often people will say like, “Oh, well, how are queer and trans people impacted by climate change, by which they mean white gay men,” and I start to say all the things about the high rates of homelessness and things like that. Then they'll say, “Oh, well, isn't that just a problem of the vulnerability of people who are homeless?” And it's like, yes, it’s the same with the vulnerability of people who have mental illness and disabilities. One of the solutions that we need is universal health care.
So how do we have a queer and trans movement that's as dedicated to universal healthcare and on a micro level, on the level of mutual aid, on the level of relationships in the wake of disaster? That's one of the places that I think is important. A lot of people don't go out there into communities saying, “Oh, I'm here to provide support for trans people.” They're just cooking for community. They're growing food for community. They're engaging and healing traditions that are things that they know that their communities need that they aren't able to access in other ways.
I think of the North Bay Organizing Project and Tré Vasquez, who was leading healing clinics in the wake of the fires, and these were clinics that had limpias, that had acupuncture, that had massage with child care, food provided, and then they also had resources on how to access funds from the undocu-fund for people who are undocumented who couldn't get access to resources from FEMA. So this is a really holistic way of caring for a marginalized community that from an outsider looking in, how is that a queer or trans solution?
It's about multiplying the options that people have to get the kind of care that they need: that's pretty queer to me.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and I think this is so related, but you've also explored queer as a verb. So, for example, highlighting the idea of queering resilience and especially when we're at a crossroads confronting the converging crises that I believe is really calling us into question and disrupting norms to be more adaptable and fluid in our responses and to embrace change. What critical contributions do you think the disabled, queer, and trans communities can gift to the collective to help a lot of people who may feel stuck and help guide us towards becoming more imaginative in envisioning all of our possibilities going forward?
Vanessa Raditz: The first thing that's coming to me isn't actually an answer to your question, but it is an important thing to hold in mind when going down that line of thought. I saw a number of folks on social media and a number of folks in disability justice work were saying pretty soon you'll have all these organizations turning to us for the creative solutions for resilience, which they won't use to help us survive. That kind of brings me back to the story of eco-feminists who would use the memory of queer Indigenous people to then promote their own political agendas that mostly benefited white people.
I think a big part of the answer here is being in solidarity with the leadership of marginalized communities and their struggles for self-determination and liberatory futures, and that it's through being in solidarity that we can be transformed in the service of the work and learn how to help our own survival.
It's about solidarity, at the end of the day.
Kamea Chayne: Finally, before we go into our lightning-round closing questions, what else feels pertinent for you to share here to help close our main discussion? And what are some of your calls to action or invitations for deeper learning for our listeners?
Vanessa Raditz: Oh, there's so much, and I'm always nervous that I've said something that wasn't exactly what I mean, it's just so difficult when it comes to thinking about these tense incommensurate abilities and our different needs for survival.
I just want to say on one level that I'm really here on this planet to be in community and to continue to learn. So to anyone listening, if there's something that I've said that rubbed you the wrong way, reach out because I think if we're going to build a movement that's capable of collective liberation, we need to be in conversation with each other. And I'm just really, really trying to find a way to imagine a queer eco-justice movement that leaves no one behind and is committed to reparations and is committed to land rematriation, and that's going to involve a lot more conversations. So I want to say that.
Also, I want to let people know about the Fire and Flood film. There is currently a sneak peek draft of the project, it's a 104-minute film that you can book for community screening, a public event, private event have at your house. It's 100 percent donation-based. I have suggested donations if you're with an organization that has funds, but the point is to get it out into community and to have these conversations and with the money that we raise through this sneak peek.
I'm working on turning this film into a 10 episode web series that will be open, free, available, specifically formatted to help educators in high schools, youth groups, and undergraduate level bring these conversations into their classes. Where the queer generation is currently looking at a future of climate instability and is ready for the kinds of messages that these queer and trans activists in the film are trying to transmit. So if you would like, that's the best way to help get this film out there. To get the web series ready and in the hands of educators is to host a screening now and to have these conversations.
And yeah, you can find out more at https://www.queerecoproject.org/home, and feel free to reach out to me at any point. I'm here to be in community.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Vanessa Raditz: OK, so if you're interested in these intersections of things that I've been talking about, I cannot recommend enough that you follow Queer Nature. So and Pinar are inspirations to me. The depth and passion in their writing brings these abstract concepts like biocultural diversity in the queer community to life. So follow Queer nature.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Vanessa Raditz: I'm not a very hopeful person, I'm actually I'm definitely a pessimist by inclination, but I say that hope is a political discipline and I remind myself of that. And Wangari Maathai said the best time to plant a tree was 50 years ago. But the second-best time is now. So when things feel hopeless, that is my reminder. That I can't change what we didn't do 50 years ago, but the second-best time is now.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your greatest inspirations right now?
Vanessa Raditz: The Earth has an incredibly resilient capacity to regenerate, and I am very inspired by the activism around the world that is partnering in this art of regeneration and building deep relationships that reconnect mind, body, land, and spirit.
Kamea Chayne: Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me here today. It's been an honor and pleasure to have you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Vanessa Raditz: The ancestral futures are created in the here and now.
