Show 3

Friday / 3-5:15p / The Big Idea

We are living in a climate crisis of such unfathomable urgency, with massive global implications, that it is hard to comprehend. The women in this show will explore how we are coping with this fierce catastrophe in our own backyards. Thimali Kodikara is the producer of the Mothers of Invention podcast, which has the tagline “Climate change is a man-made problem with a feminist solution", and will share some of the stories of the women working around the world. Scientist Lauren Oakes went to Alaska to study a dying tree called the yellow cedar but what she learned about herself, hope and humanity is the subject of an essential book called In Search of the Canary Tree. Tatiana Schlossberg’s new book, Inconspicuous Consumption, dives deeply into our everyday individual lives and how we can self-correct our carbon-intensive ways. 17-year-old Aniya Windgate was displaced from her grandmother’s home by Hurricane Harvey and has become an activist dancer channeling her existential fear into a mesmerizing performance. A major report published last year by an array of noted scientists said there were 12 years left to seriously lower our global emissions. As any of these speakers will attest, now there are only eleven years left.

Speakers

Aniya Wingate

Aniya Windgate is a teenager who was displaced from her grandmother’s home during Hurricane Harvey and processed that trauma through a riveting dance performance that captures both the pain and perseverance of the experience. She is also the subject of a feature-length documentary about this that is a work-in-progress called Raising Aniya and will contribute to the Mother of All Issues show.

Lauren Oakes

In 2010, scientist Lauren E. Oakes headed down a dark road to understand the mass die-off of yellow cedar trees on the outer coast of Southeast Alaska. Immersed in a deeper and broader story of adaptation of both people and the forest, she wrote a book In Search of the Canary Tree that captures this experience with insight, context and hope. She will speak in the Mother of All Issues show about what her scientific inquiry into the yellow cedar taught her about humanity.

Tatiana Schlossberg

Tatiana Schlossberg is a climate change and environmental journalist whose first book, "Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have," comes out in August. She previously reported on those subjects for the Science and Climate sections at the New York Times. As a part of our Climate Change show, Schlossberg will explain and explore the everyday environmental impacts of all of our stuff -- food, fashion, technology and transportation -- from how much energy it takes to stream videos to the way polyester shirts contribute to ocean pollution. “In the name of convenience or immediate gratification or profit, we’ve created a world where we use resources because we can, with little attention paid to our waste and the problems it creates.” There’s humor and hope in her writing, an attitude that will bring life to the OT stage with entertainingly brutal and factual honesty.

Thimali Kodikara

Thimali Kodikara hails from London but has lived in Brooklyn, where she produces the Doc Society’s groundbreaking podcast, Mothers Of Invention, which explores feminist solutions to climate change from around the world. She has also worked at Getty Images and Christie’s but now really focuses on understanding how women around the world are grappling with the dramatically heating planet, having talked to so many who are on the front lines of the fast-moving climate crisis.

Sandra Winther

Sandra Winther is a New York-based film director from Copenhagen, Denmark. Much of her work tells the stories of underrepresented youth, mainly centering on subcultures across America. Her documentary Lowland Kids tackles the complex subject of climate change through the eyes of two American teenagers living on a sinking island in Louisiana.

Films

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