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RECORDING: This is a production of Cornell University Library.
MARIANNE KRASNY: Thank you. All right, great. So I wanted to start by just introducing you to a few civic ecology practices, get an idea of what they are, and also, hopefully, why I'm so passionate about them. So the first one that I was introduced to was community gardening in New York City. And I don't know how many of you have been to the dynamic community gardens, like in the city, or Houston, or just big cities wherever I go, Toronto.
And I really love them. Because for one, they're very diverse. So I think this gentleman is from Mexico. But basically, he's bringing his practices, he's brought seeds, probably, with him when he immigrated, and he's growing them in the Bronx, in this case. And then he has an after school program of young people that are coming and learning from him, as well as learning the science right there in their own neighborhoods.
This is another one. This is on the Bronx River, oyster restoration projects, where we have young people and citizens helping scientists to restore oysters into the New York estuary. This one you probably recognize if you've been here for longer, since before they had those fences there. So we had a student group, Friends of the Gorge, and we did trail restoration, actually, right down here in Fall Creek Gorge. So this is a little dated photo.
But again, another sort of a grassroots or volunteer community practice to restore nature and restore some of the services that nature offers. So when I travel, I usually like to go and see if I can visit a community gardener. This one, actually, I got to actually help out with the actual practice. This was in Miami. I was down there giving a talk, and then I search, because you can't really search specific ecology, but I search for different organizations, and I found one that was having an invasive species removal project that weekend at a state park in Miami.
And we're removing burma grass. We're not removing those Burmese pythons, thank god, just burma grass. But so it's a chance to get to meet people and see kind of what the civic engagement is in a particular community. And then this one right here in Ithaca, Friends of Ithica City Cemetery. And about twice a year we do cleanups of the cemetery.
We prune trees, drag fallen branches away, and then this is really unique, because we also restore some of the gravestones. Because the older ones, you can't see them anymore, and there's some special solvents or whatever the are, I don't know, where you can clean them so that we can actually read the engravings. And oh, just as an advertisement, our next cleanup is in a month or two, a month and a half, Memorial Day weekend.
So come on down. And the cool thing is that after the cleanup get a free tour of the city cemetery. And the oldest gravestones there are from the 1700s, and there's actually some gravestones of slaves. So it's really, really interesting to get a tour. So come on out. OK.
And then so we had all these practices, and then the first book that my colleague Keith Tidball wrote was with MIT Press called Civic Ecology: Adaptation and transformation from the ground up. And basically what we did was we tried to distill what's common amongst all these principles, like what's motivating people to be involved, what are some of the outcomes, social and ecological. And we put them all in 10 principles, which are the organization of this book, so one chapter per principle.
And then I was really fortunate that I got some funding from Cornell University to do a MOOC. So if you've ever thought about MOOCS and books, or books and-- anyway, but so MOOCS, for those of you that don't know, is a Massive Open Online Course. And for that one, I think we had about 4,000 students register. And so the name of the MOOC was "Reclaiming Broken Places," because the publicity people at edX decided Civic Ecology wouldn't attract anybody.
But anyway, "Reclaiming Broken Places, Introduction to Civic Ecology." So I have the book, I have the MOOC. And I'm constantly thinking, like these are really, really small practices. Right? Like one little block for a community garden, or cleanup of a small local cemetery, and we know that there's just tremendous problems that are facing us. This is the recent flooding in Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Malawi.
So I'm constantly struggling. Do these practices make any difference? Because I really, really enjoy volunteering and reading and thinking about these practices, and writing, but I realize there's sort of a disconnect there. So you can see, it's kind of like you sort of feel like you're on an island with a little bit of green, but all around you is the sharks of the climate change, or the rising sea level, whatever. So it presents a dilemma.
So this is why I wanted to write the second book, or I edited it, that really focuses on the broader impact. So we have these little tiny practices. And is there any way they can scale up to have a broader impact? That's the question that we wanted to answer.
And to do that, I put together teams. So each team had a practitioner, so somebody who was involved in a civic ecology practice, and an academic. And the idea was that the academic would apply some sort of conceptual lens or theoretical lens to the particular practice, and that together they would co-author book chapters of this book. So none of these people had met each other. The practitioners that I paired that I thought would do well with particular academics, they had met each other. So I don't know how many of you are familiar with SESYNC, or the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center. It's in Annapolis. It's an NSF funded center.
And you can apply for them, unfortunately, not for big grants, but they do fund workshops. So they'll fund the travel expenses, and they'll find your lodging, et cetera, your food. If you put together a workshop, they like them to be interdisciplinary and people that aren't already working together, and then you're supposed to produce a product afterwards. So we got some support to bring all these people together to SESYNC in Annapolis, really nice facility.
And David Maddox, who-- actually, I don't know if any of you remember him. He had a PhD from EEMB about probably the time I got my PhD. And so he facilitated our workshop. He runs this organization called the Nature of Cities now in New York. But it's a global site where he basically condenses writing about the nature of cities, and he's doing a workshop soon in Paris.
So David put together-- so what he did was-- there we go. He basically put together a short video. And he recorded these different practitioners and academics, and he just asked them to find civic ecology. What does it mean to you? So I'm going to play about four and a half minutes, which maybe about six or seven people so that you get a feel for some of the characters that showed up at this workshop.
KEITH TIDBALL: So to me, civic ecology is about community based natural resource management that helps expose people and engage people in the idea of a land ethic, Aldo Leopold's idea of a land ethic. And that includes thinking about the community as more than just the people in the neighborhood or the people on the block. It includes the other life from the soil, to the birds, to the bees, and the wildlife, the trees, the atmosphere-- all of that is the community that we live in.
So civic ecology, for me, is this community based natural resource management that leads to both civic social sorts of outcomes that are positive or desirable, and ecological outcomes that are positive or desirable. And those sort of civic ecology outcomes should be meaningful. They should be memorable. And most importantly, they should be measurable.
ZAHRA GOLSHANI: I see civic ecology as activity that connect people to nature and also helps people to feel the sense of community and social capital together.
TRACI SOOTER: Civic ecology to me is restoring the natural landscape to create spaces for which people can heal and rejuvenate.
REBECCA SALMINEN WITT: When I think about civic ecology, I really think about the process of an individual community deciding what matters to it in terms of its own ecology, the ecology of its neighborhood, the ecology of its neighbors, and figuring out what it can do on its own as a community to make those ecological objectives happen and become reality. At the Greening of Detroit, we really think it's part of our job to create opportunities for those folks to see that reality happen in real time.
One of my favorite projects was a project where we talked with kids about what they might like to see in the vacant space in their neighborhood. They envisioned a little pocket park. All they really wanted was a slide. And we created a five year plan to make the pocket park happen. And someone got excited about that, brought funding and resources to the project. And we were able to make that project happen in about a six month time frame.
What was great about it is that the same kids who were little when they envisioned that pocket park, that slide they wanted, were still little enough to slide down the slide once it got built. That is kind of civic ecology in action. That is a community taking hold of a space that was important to it and making it something that worked for itself, and making the ecosystem better as a result.
ERIKA SVENDSEN: My definition of civic ecology, or what I think about when we use that term, is people taking action for themselves, and in that action, thinking beyond themselves, and thinking about all the different issues that are important to a community, to a place, and beyond.
JILL WRIGLEY: And when I think of civic ecology, I think of it as a framework to help describe many of the things that we're doing in our neighborhood and community, including tending to trash in our stream, planting native plants, working with kids, educating them about the environment, and just trying to live in a more sustainable way with others in our neighborhood.
VERONICA KYLE: When I think of civic ecology, I think about engagement of people in their natural environment. That can be everything from in their community park, to a local beach, to a forest preserve. I think about science and nature, people, and nurturing of their environment coming together, hands on, learning, multi-generational. I think about no books, no science books, no homework, just life work in the environment.
ANIRUDDHA ABHYANKAR: What is civic ecology to me? So when we remember that we are a species, that is ecology. When we remember it together with people, it is civic. And to realize both through our practice, then it is practicing civic ecology.
OK. You don't need to hear me.
[LAUGHING]
MARIANNE KRASNY: And now, I think-- I think it works. I think. So, OK, so now you get an idea of some of the characters that were there. Anyways, it was a pretty interesting group, as you can see. And then we left this workshop, and we had to write our chapters. Right? They had met each other for-- I can't remember-- it was two or three days.
So now we were getting down to the real work. And so how many of you saw the newspaper this morning and Julian Assange walking out? Did you see the photos? Did you notice that seven years ago he looked a little different than before he went into the Ecuadorian embassy?
Well, that's kind of like the way I felt, like before and after writing this book. Well, hopefully I didn't change in appearance that as much as he did. It was only three years instead of seven years, but you get the idea. So, I mean, I think it was a really, really challenging assignment for these people.
Because one, a practitioner and an academic trying to write together. Two, they didn't really know each other. Three, I mean, I don't know how many of them have edited a book before, but I mean, it's a lot worse than herding cats. Like, I'd rather herd 100 cats.
So it was difficult, but we eventually accomplished our goal. And I just wanted to give you just a little idea of what's in the book. So basically as I edited the book, and sort of we're finishing it up, and I'm having to synthesize this, three themes really emerged about how these practices could scale up to be something, have a broader impact. So the first theme was culture building.
And I will go into one or two examples of each of the three themes, but I am not going to go into the example of Veronica's book, but you saw Veronica, the African-American woman who works at Faith and Place, which is a nonprofit in Chicago. And just an example, her partner was Laurel Kerns, who's a religious studies professor at Drew University in New Jersey. And I really like their chapter, because Veronica does a very interesting program in Chicago.
So basically, because she's working with African-American and Latino audiences mostly, and so she tries to have them talk about their stories of migration. Her family's from Alabama, and how they migrated to Chicago, to the industrial North, or from Latin America, but mostly from rural southern states in the African-American migration. And then she has this monarch butterfly program. So she tries to get people to plant milkweed for the butterfly, and to relate the migration story of the butterfly, and how we need to welcome the butterfly just as people welcomed us when we moved to Chicago.
The next theme is knowledge building. And we had three chapters there. And then the last one is movement building, so social movements. So the three themes, culture building, knowledge building, and movement building. And I will give, as I mentioned, an example of each one.
So this is one in culture building that I also found very interesting. So basically the two authors are Karim Kassam, who's in the Department of Natural Resources here. He was the academic. And then Zahra Golshani, who you saw her. She was the woman with the head scarf in the video. She's Iranian-American, but she goes back to Iran quite a bit.
So when she went back to Iran, she came across this group, Nature Cleaners, and they're a group that was started by a gentleman who had lived in Germany, I think, for 30 years. He had spent his working life in Germany. Then he went back to Iran. When he came back, he went to some of the sites that he had gone as a young child, and they were totally trashed out. So he decided he's going to pick up trash.
And then, because of-- I think it's a Telegram that they use, not Facebook in Iran, but basically the local version of Facebook, this practice went viral, and eventually he had civic groups in all of the states-- I think there's 30 some or something-- in Iran that we're doing this practice, that were chapters of nature cleaners. So they go and do litter cleanups in public spaces.
So when Zahra-- just a minute. I'm going to get a little drink of water here. So she went she went and did some volunteer cleanups with this group, she would interview some of the people in the group. And one of the things that one of the leaders said was that their main motivation is-- this leader is talking about the volunteers. Their main motivation is [INAUDIBLE]. And of course, I don't speak Farsi, so I have no idea exactly how you pronounce it.
But so when they wrote this chapter, they had this interesting quote here, but they hadn't really-- so this is just because I'm trying to balance a little bit, telling you a little bit the process of writing the book as well as what's in the book. But Dr. Kassam had applied his conceptual lens, but it wasn't really about [INAUDIBLE], so I said, well, this is interesting. I wonder what it is.
So actually there's a book in Mann Library that I found on [INAUDIBLE]. And it's government directed campaigns to change culture. So the examples that they used that I read about were-- one was birth control, so family planning, family size. And apparently in one generation, because of a government campaign-- well, I think it was also because of urbanization-- so they went from over seven children per family to, I think, just over two children per family. So huge change in culture in one generation.
And the other case that was really interesting is Iran either had-- I'm not sure if this government campaign was so successful-- or it has still one of the highest car accident rates in the world. And so they had a government directed campaign to try to make people drive more courteously and safely. And so that was called [INAUDIBLE] also.
But I thought it was interesting, because these are both sort of heavily government directed campaigns that the term have been used for. But these volunteers are saying, we're going to change the culture, essentially, through these litter cleanups. And they're talking about a sort of culture of caring for public spaces of cleanliness. And those are sort of the ways that they were thinking about this.
OK, knowledge building. This is an author from Colombia, and then the academic is Arjen Wals from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. But apparently in Bogota, they do a lot of seed saving, native seeds, kind of native indigenous food type activities and seed exchanges. And then once a year there's this group that gets everybody together from across Colombia that's doing similar types of activity, and they have a weekend long workshop. Or no, I think it's a week long workshop.
And so basically why I'm calling this knowledge building is because this is a chance for everybody who's doing these similar sorts of practices to exchange practices and learn from each other. They also do a practice locally while they're there, so they get all experience doing something together. This is why the slide of tree planting is part of the workshop.
And then the third one is movement building. So has anybody been to this site? Nobody? Are you sure?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
MARIANNE KRASNY: Oh OK. That was a trick question, because this apart is not yet built.
[LAUGHING]
But this part, the Anacostia Bridge, I'm not sure which one it is, but that's there. But what happened was that this was the former bridge. This is a rendition. But you can see the pillars, which are real. So the bridge they took it down all except through the pillars and then this group the citizens group that got together. And they said, well, we want to create this amazing park that would unite the two sides of the Anacostia River, which is pretty symbolic in terms of class, and race, et cetera, in DC.
So, I mean, this is kind of a grassroots group. It's not a government group, but they've obviously raised a lot of money, because they've hired some very high end design firms to make the design, and they're trying to raise the money to build this-- what will be the 11th Street Bridge Park. So I put this under movement building, because if I asked how many of you have been to High Line, I'd probably get a lot of people saying they've been to High Line in New York City.
Is anybody not familiar with what High Line is? So have you been there, [INAUDIBLE]? No? Do you know what it is? Again, it's derelict infrastructure, right? So in this case, it's an elevated railway that was falling apart. They're going to take it down, and then a citizens group got together, they raised tons of money, and they built this beautiful linear park on the old railroad site in the city.
So when I was talking to the people involved in the 11th Street Bridge Park, they said that there is now actually a network of people that are doing these kinds of projects. There's one in Chicago, too. They're doing a Rails to Trails project in the city of Chicago. So there's a lot of these.
And what they're basically trying to do is learn from High Line the lessons they learned about gentrification, because if you've been to High Line there was massive, massive gentrification around High Line, which a lot of it was probably a result of having this wonderful green infrastructure in the community. And they're very concerned about what's going to happen with 11th Street Bridge project, and trying to do a lot of community organizing to prevent that same scenario.
OK, so I have one other practice to share under movement building. This one is The Ugly Indian. There's www.theuglyindian.com. Sorry. Sorry, Javid.
[LAUGHING]
I'm sure you've never heard of them before, which is maybe good-- no. You saw, actually, Aniruddha in the film. He was the last person I did. He was the guy from The Ugly Indian, and I was actually the co-author with him. So basically this is a bunch of guys that are sort of the new 30-ish, well educated, master's degree class of Indians who live in cities, and they don't want to live with these kinds of public spaces, which are very common in India, or at least they were when I was there, which was probably about 10 years ago.
And so they organized this group, The Ugly Indian. They have a great website. You can go there. And they have a strong Facebook presence. And they do what they call spot fixes, so they just get everybody out there through social media. And in three hours they convert what's on the left to what's on the right.
You can see that it's the same site, right? You see the same wall. They paint it. Javid, I don't know if this is true. But what they've told me is that they paint it that color because it's a neutral color amongst all the cultures and religions in India, and also because people chew what I call beetle juice, or betel nut. You guys know-- there's another name for it.
AUDIENCE: Pon.
MARIANNE KRASNY: Pon, yeah. And has anybody ever seen somebody chewing betel nut? And what is sort of dripping down her chin when she was doing?
AUDIENCE: It's not dripping. It's [INAUDIBLE].
MARIANNE KRASNY: Oh, it's spitting down.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
MARIANNE KRASNY: Yeah. So yeah, when I first saw somebody chewing or whatever they were doing, I thought they were bleeding like profusely from their mouth. But anyways, they do spit it, so they make stains. So that's the second reason they're using this color. All right. So I wanted to say about The Ugly Indian, there's a bunch of the things that are interesting about them. One is that they-- and this has to do with scaling up their impact.
So they try to plan these-- they call them spot fixes. And they planned them one near either the homes of famous rugby players, famous Bollywood actors and actresses, and government buildings. And so the idea is that they're going to-- I'll just cover the government buildings part-- they're going to embarrass the government, because the government is not taking care of these spaces, which they believe the government should be. So if they put these near a government building, then they think they're going to embarrass the government, and then maybe they'll start taking some responsibility for these spaces.
And they've actually had some success. At least, what's happened a lot now is that-- you can see it here. This was actually like an hour ago when I was doing some last minute Facebook searching, or whatever, visiting Facebook before I came over here. And Arut had just posted that they've now done 12 underpasses. So what happens is the government-- now, I don't know if they pay them. Or they must. But they've actually enlisted The Ugly Indian to do a lot of these beautification.
This one doesn't have green elements. Sometimes they do some plantings with them. But you can see a space that you can see a little bit that would look like this they're trying to convert here. And I don't know. Do you know, Javid, if that blue and white has any meaning? You don't. OK. But they have a different model than nature cleaners in that they don't want chapters in different cities. They want people to do this, but they don't want them to call themselves The Ugly Indian, because they're very afraid that somebody will use their name and then do some kind of thing that really pisses somebody off and they get a bad reputation.
And so their different chapters will be called like Mumbai Rising, or something like that, not The Ugly Indian. But they have spread widely, and actually they have some practices in Pakistan now that are copying them. And it's all kind of mediated, and I think get people out there through social media. And you saw before that if you do one of these, you post what it looks like before, and then you post what it looks like after. So there's sort of a big visual component.
So not that you want to read all this, but this is just to let you know that there is some content in the book. And this was from The Ugly Indian chapter. And this one was really interesting, because for me, anyway, as I worked on it, I had to do a lot of reading of different literatures. Because I'm trying to figure out, is this a practice?
So they call it a practice. They call it, as I mentioned, a spot fix, clean up a spot, or fix a spot. Is it an organization? Well, not really. They don't have a building. They have supposedly about five people that are running this organization that are all like Aniruddha, the way I understood it. As I mentioned, they're sort of well educated people, and they have some design background, but they're anonymous.
And so the idea is they don't want anyone to take credit for this. Like, they five people in their group that's organizing this, and they don't want one guy to get out ahead. And even for Aniruddha to come, it was very difficult. Because they'd never had one person get this much visibility.
And then the last thing, is it a movement, or is it a social movement? And I don't know. But one of the things I ran across when I was looking at social movements is this whole idea of connective action, and the idea that because of social media, the form of social movements is very different than it was previous to social media, so that a lot of those sort of memes and what we're calling ourselves, they emerge from people that are in the practice. One example that's commonly used is I am the 1% from the Occupy Movement. They just threw it out there and said, somebody tell us what we should call ourselves. And it came out from somebody who wrote back and said, I have diabetes, I can't go to college, and I'm like the 99%, or I'm not the 1%, or whatever, can't afford to buy my medicine.
Anyway, you know, and obviously, they're using very clever things like we're all ugly Indians, we're all responsible for this. But the idea is that these are movements that are very much mediated, and even sort of framed by social media and by the people that are part of them. OK, so the question is, did we sort of come up with some broader impacts of these practices? And I think we came up with some possible pathways to broader impacts. And I've discussed them through the knowledge building, culture building, and movement building.
I also think it's interesting to think about the model of having practitioners and academics write together, and what that means, especially for the practitioners. I already told you what it means for the academics. It's difficult. But about a week ago, I get this email from Aniruddha, again, from The Ugly Indian. And he says, "The Ugly Indian chapter in the book, Grassroots to Global, is being referred to by many as an essential read for the researchers and government authorities in India."
He says, "Notably, researchers from the University of Minnesota, University of Washington, Harvard, and researchers in New Zealand, apart from the people in India who have wrote back to us about the book and chapter. And recently we had a great fortune to host a highly acclaimed person in the field of design and design thinking from UC San Diego, and this person finds the book and our chapter to be an excellent read, and wants to implement some principles in San Diego."
So they're very happy about this achievement. So, you know, nobody's coming to me and telling me it's a great read and that they're going to use it, and et cetera, et cetera. But it's nice to hear from them. But I think what this is really saying, you know, I don't know if I take literally all this great fortune that they had, but for him it is a way-- my colleagues here have done these online courses when you write with practitioners, when you work with practitioners, it's sort of-- because Cornell has an international reputation, it really validates what they're doing, I think, to have us be interested in what they're doing.
OK, so have I solved my dilemma? I don't think so. If anybody has, let me know. But I do want to just comment on, briefly, where I'm going from here. So I have this new project that Mary mentioned at the beginning, the Cornell Climate Online Fellows. And here we're not focusing on civic ecology practices, per se. It's more individual action and can we scale up our individual action through our social networks?
So that's the question. Is there a place for individual action? There's been some interesting articles. There was one in The Guardian about a boycott of Barclays Bank. And the person made the argument that if people take individual action, like if we buy our individual climate offsets for our airfare, if we do a vegetarian diet, or something, we're blaming ourselves for this climate crisis, and it's not our fault. It's really the oil companies' fault, and it's big banks' fault. So we should be blaming them, putting all our energies there and not--
And if any of you listen to the podcast, Drilled, which is about the disinformation campaign from Exxon and other big oil companies, it makes the same argument. It's the oil companies, their disinformation campaign. We should not be blaming ourselves and doing these little things like going vegan or whatever we're doing, eating Impossible Burgers. I don't know if anybody's tried them yet. They're not bad.
OK, so excuse me, I'm getting a little dry mouth. But we have 35 fellows, as Mary mentioned, from 26 countries. And this is where-- I think this is going to do it. Yeah. So you can see them. So actually, it's just been amazing, because I'm working with these guys over 12 weeks, we communicate online, not in real time, but once a week we have a webinar. Usually about 30 of them make it. This morning fewer people made it. A bunch of them writing me that they're sick.
But, you know, we've been doing this for eight weeks. So I expect a little decline in the amount of participation. And it's pretty amazing that we're getting-- usually for about seven weeks, we've gotten about 30 people out of this 35, because the time zones is not convenient for everybody. So one person that has only made it about once-- I just want to introduce to you a few people so you can see how diverse they are-- is this guy. Sorry, there's a problem that this cut off. Well, I can show you the full.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
MARIANNE KRASNY: I don't know why. Like, this guy is a high school student. He lives in a suburb of Vancouver. I don't know why he has so many books. But anyways, this is Tadjeep. And his climate action that he's going to do in his-- he's actually going to do a plant rich diet. And I think he's going to work on food waste. So he's doing it through some environmental clubs in his high school.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
MARIANNE KRASNY: Yeah, I can go back. And, I mean, the amazing thing-- I'm just going to show you-- is we have somebody from Yemen. His name's Omar. He's actually been-- I can't understand if he really has a job right now-- but he's worked with human rights with the UN, basically. And some of these guys take you so seriously. Because really, they're not paying, and so there's no grade. Right?
So I have no power over them. But he wanted to do a climate action. I can't remember what it was. And then this week he wrote me, and it was actually very sad, because a child had picked up a landmine on the way to school, and it had exploded, and the child had died. And he had said, I've been wanting to work on landmines. So you know him, because he was in one of our online courses. And then I stopped working on it, because it's been too dangerous to work on that issue politically.
But now that this happened with this child, I have to work on landmines. And he relates it to climate, because of the weather patterns, flooding, it exposes the landmines more. And then more people like children are likely to pick them up. Did I get that right, Annie? Because has known him also.
So this is just an example of one of our fellows. And then, let's see, who else will I do? I'm going to see if I can get Bianca. Yeah, so this is Bianca. She's from Kenya, and she's worked with all these UN Article VI of the Paris Accords. So basically, what she does is she works with a program where the EU is buying offsets from Kenya. And so the Kenyans are supposed to do, like, solar energy, or any projects, and then the EU gets credit for it.
And, you know, a lot of times these things are really criticized, because are they taken advantage, are the Kenyans really benefiting? But as a consultant, she works to try to make sure that these things work for both the EU and Kenya. So some of these guys are really high capacity, and they're a lot of higher capacity than I am. They've worked globally on all these different issues, and it's just been really fun to meet them.
OK. And everything goes right. This is where I think I'm going to need some help, because I can don't two copies of the thing. Thank you.
STUDENT: You're welcome. OK.
MARIANNE KRASNY: It's only a few more slides.
STUDENT: Go back in.
MARIANNE KRASNY: Thank you. OK, so I decided because I was making-- oh, so I mentioned with Tadjeep-- they're choosing an action, and then they're doing it in their network. Right? So it could be their Instagram followers, or it could be people in their school, like Tadjeep is doing. So as several of you know, I decided to do one too, and try to convince my network, which basically people in my building. And I really wish I would have chosen a social network, because it's so much more anonymous than trying to knock on somebody's door and say, Jim, did you remember to buy those carbon offsets that you promised me you'd buy me for that next air flight?
Krasny, I thought I had a month to do this. Why are you bugging me right now? So yeah, I chose this if anybody likes [INAUDIBLE]. I don't know how many of you are familiar with it, but to give them a plug, they're really a cool organization. They're local. And you know what? It's been interesting. I've talked to a lot of people in [INAUDIBLE], and what they really like is that the money is spent locally to help people weatherize their homes.
So it's not going to, like, the Amazon forest or something you feel like, well, how is it really being spent? And we have a team, [INAUDIBLE] and Friends. Thank you, Dr. Chabot, for joining our team today. He only took one email. He was very convincable. That's because he's been a leader in carbon offsets already on campus. But so we have 15 players. We're number five. Anybody can join.
In fact, I've brought some flyers. But after you join, and you just can either do a little donation, or you can offset a trip that you might be taking. But after you join, don't forget to-- after you pay, you'll have an option to join our team. So don't forget to contribute to our team, [INAUDIBLE] and Friends, so that I can report back to my fellows that I had a very successful campaign of influencing my social network. We'll see.
OK, so--
STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE]
MARIANNE KRASNY: Well, you can make another one, Jim. I'll be back tomorrow.
[LAUGHING]
OK, so yeah, I think this is sort of a little bit about my search for meaning in life, and how can my life be meaningful. But I just wanted to thank Mann Library, in particular, and Cornell University Press, who's been really great to work with, and SESYNC. And then Engaged Cornell hasn't funded this work, but I think they've done a lot of interesting thinking along these lines. And then, finally, the great members of my lab over here who have contributed to all this work. So, I think we have a little bit of time for questions.
[APPLAUSE]
RECORDING: This has been a production of Cornell University Library.
Urban communities around the world are developing new ethics and cultures around their relationship with nature. In a Chats in the Stacks book talk April 11, 2019, Marianne E. Krasny, Professor in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University, presented her new edited volume Grassroots to Global: Broader Impacts of Civic Ecology (Cornell University Press, 2018 ) discussing this collection of case studies in which contributing scholars and stewards from different countries and diverse disciplines have partnered to paint a current picture of civic ecology, and explore the impact and import of civic ecological practices around the world.
