Episode 20 - Tania Abdul - Breathe in Community
Published on: Feb 16, 2022
Tania Abdul
Listen in as Linet and Alexis talk with Tania Abdul, Executive Director of Breathe, a network for promoting racial, climate, and environmental justice. She brings years of organizational experience to her role, but has also worked as an immersive experience producer, and is well-accomplished in leveraging the power of music, technology, art, and community to create compelling narratives. We had a blast talking with her about organizing action, alternative-culture communities, attention, and movement and relationship building.
Please check out their website and suggestions in this episode:
Breathe on Facebook
Breathe on Instagram
Breathe Website
Resources and Activists cited in this episode:
POC Psychedelic Collective
People of Technicolor Facebook Group - for the PoTC Podcast
Bayview and Hunters Point Mothers and Fathers Committee
Green Action
Dr. Sumchai Hunters Point Community Biomonitoring Project
SF Bay Shoreline Contamination Cleanup Coalition
Urban Sustainability Directors Network
Climate Reality Project
Sunflower alliance
SF Bay Keeper
Cancer Alley
Pomo Indigenous Peoples on Wikipedia
Bloody Island Massacre (Pomo Clearlake Massacre)
Extinction Rebellion
Tohono O'odham Nation - No Wall
White Mesa Ute protesting Uranium Mills
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“Success in activism and movement building - it’s all relational… and it takes time.”
Transcript
Linet 00:00
Hey everybody, I am so excited for y'all to listen to this episode today. We have Tania, join us and we literally intervals so many stories, things that have been untold things that are unfolding things past things in the future. I think you're in for a real treat because we're getting in deep into how interconnected racial equity, racial justice, environmental justice, climate justice, it's so alive it's so vibrant. You're really going to enjoy this one.
Hi everyone! ¡Hola a todes! Linet here (and Alexis) your co-hosts both she/her bringing you impactful stories and interviews from our communities to you and explore how we can support each other.
Alexis 01:00
The Unconscious Bias Project is based in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, on unceded ancestral homeland belonging to the Ramaytush Ohlone and Muwekma Ohlone peoples, some of whom speak the language Chocheño. We encourage you to learn more about the Ohlone people on our website in the podcast links.
Hello to our wonderful guest, who is also a friend of mine, Tania Abdul (she/they). Tania is the Executive Director of Breathe, a non-profit network for racial, environmental, and climate justice. She brings years of organizational experience to her role, but has also worked as an immersive experience producer, and is well-accomplished in leveraging the power of music, technology, art, and community to create compelling narratives. I’m excited to see how Tania forms stories and spurs action using these skills. Welcome, Tania!
Tania 02:02
Thank you. Thank you, Alexis and Linet.
Alexis 02:06
Yeah, it's good to have you here, I'm really excited. To start us off, can you tell us in the audience, what is breathe?
Tania 02:15
Ah. So Breathe is a fledgling nonprofit organization that intends to be a major movement builder, creating actual relationships and change within the mega-umbrella spheres of racial, environmental, and climate justice. So that means we are taking on intersectional solidarity, building actual end engagement in our audience, we intend to make the world into the world that we want it to be, right? So we all got started together in June of 2020. Very quickly, on our first meeting, which was intended to be an exploratory meeting about creating an educational benefit concert and event, it's connecting the dots around racial equity and the climate crisis. And very quickly, everybody that was involved was like, we need to do something that will be lasting and build movement, or it’s not gonna be worth our time. Breathe, the name, it was born within a couple hours of this really exciting meeting. And we've been running with it, ever since we have come up with a solution that is unique to the field at this point. Not that we would need to be the only, you know, group building movement, please bring on as many solutions as possible. Yeah. So it's been exciting. We've had some slow starts at some things. But we've also had just amazing good fortune in partnerships. And, yeah, it feels it feels like we're doing something that could really be helpful.
Alexis 03:56
So can you tell us a little bit about just generally what that approach is?
Tania 04:01
Sure. So stripped down. We are storytelling, and broadcasting the stories of folks on the front lines of climate justice, environmental justice and racial justice, working at community level, actually, at every scale, really. We have partners working internationally, we have partners working in a particular neighborhood, or in this particular school. So the idea is to tell the stories and then our audience is moved. And in our stories, we do include the arts. So we have music performance, visual arts, from the community, and that moved audience member has the immediate opportunity to make a difference in some way. They'd be willing to divert, you know, some of their resources of time, energy, attention, even just to share the story. That's absolutely the goal. Every story that we broadcast, every story that we tell is of an initiative, a community that's looking for support, looking to outreach to a bigger audience. That audience member, if they stick around with Breathe and become part of the network, then they will begin to see that their effort, that that piece of themselves that they donated, that they diverted to be supportive, was not a drop in the ocean, that they are part of a growing movement that is actually making a difference. That's the beginning of the hook. And then moving on, if they stick around, and there's opportunities for further education organizations, organize their training, and ways to build initiatives and projects within their own neighborhood or their own sphere of their own, like affinity field, I guess, and actually build support for whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. And then we play our events, listening conferences, there's a lot down the road that will be happening. But in the beginning, or early stage, we're storytelling and getting people on board to take action. It's a lot actually. Right, we're incorporating art-ivism. And just the idea about the building of a movement, which is complex and unpredictable. The idea is that we're going to build a container that can hold all kinds of emergence, like beautiful, emergent, relationships and synergies that we can't predict now.
Alexis 06:35
It reminds me of the in Rome, they would say that Art and Writing have three purposes. And those are to delight, to move, and to teach. And that the best does all three, of course, and it sounds like you are super on top of that. And that everything that you're doing is about all three of those things at once. Absolutely. One of my favorite YouTubers, one of the drums that he's kind of constantly beating is that one of the most precious resources that you have is your attention, that what you give attention to, is what you do something about what you give attention to is what you amplify what you give attention to is where your energy is going.
Tania 07:27
And we are all wealthy in attention. We all have it. Yeah.
Alexis 07:32
And the point he makes is, look at how much companies are spending for our attention. Look at how much money is going into Facebook, into Tiktok, into all of these algorithms that are designed to do one thing, and that is get and keep our attention. And if that itself doesn't tell you how valuable your attention is that that is the economy that so many of these huge corporations are really trying to capitalize on is getting your attention like that, that itself speaks volumes about how valuable your attention is.
Tania 08:15
Oh, god, that's such an interesting and important perspective, or to apply to just everything that we are working to accomplish. I mean, it is extremely challenging to gain people's attention. Yeah. Part of our plan, I suppose you'd say it has been to open people's doors to, I guess, their attention. Yeah, with really famous people. You know, like, like Jamie Foxx, you know, like, really - Stevie Wonder.
Alexis 08:53
That's amazing. So another couple of follow-up questions: when you and your colleagues originally got together to start planning, why, this group - what brought all of you together and for what purpose?
Tania 09:14
Well I'm sure that you know many people Alexis and Linet - do you know many people who are great connectors? People who just know everyone and everyone they call is actually, response is like “Yes. Oh, who are a Yes. What are you doing? I'll help.” So there's a particular person, Ken Greenstein, a dear friend, I mean, we've gotten real much closer, of course, since we've started this project together. Oh, yeah. So everybody in the beginning was one degree separated from Ken Greenstein, it was his idea, retired and decided to take on a whole new incredibly large project immediately after retiring as a tenant rights lawyer in the Bay Area, which is amazing, heroic, heroic work he's been doing his whole career. So he retired and took on a whole new thing. He thought he was just going to do an event but then we sucked him in. So he had been really wanting to work in the realm of the climate crisis with which I think a lot, a lot of people that I know, at least, at the beginning of 2020, were adamantly like aiming to work on the climate issue issues. And, you know, what was happening in June of 2020, George Floyd had recently been murdered, along with just so many, many, many people of color, so many black people. And we really felt that at that point, people had not really connected the racial equity side of climate justice, the racial quotient, the like, the piece of that, that is, for me, the heart of us turning things around when it comes to our extractive exploitive - Well, everything we're doing really on this planet that's so destructive, it starts with changing the way that we deal with people. There's now I mean, even starting last summer, even the like federal people in the Congress, were talking about climate justice. So it's, it seemed, I guess, it was a Zeitgeist thing. But yeah, we, the idea was to do that, we felt like there wasn't really a lot of education out there. And still, I think a lot of people don't really understand how inextricably linked figuring out the racial disparities in our society, are to unraveling the climate crisis.
Linet 11:40
Can you like, give an example or, you know, like, really explain to our listeners like really concrete, sort of how racial, environmental and climate justice come together?
Tania 11:51
I'm sure I would like to start with - and maybe this will be all it's needed, with a positive take, instead of a negative take on the situation, instead of trying to outline what's gone wrong. I'd like to take on how we build into something that works, if we start with building an economy, that cares and supports for all of the people within it, and is not geared towards exploiting labor, and exploiting the like socio-political differences that come with economic differences, that come with our very racialized society or culture, then we will, by necessity, also change the economic system that's driving the climate crisis. It's impossible to do the racial equity, right? It's impossible to accomplish racial justice without also affecting the way that our economy is killing our planet.
Alexis 13:00
Can you go more into detail on that linkage?
Linet 13:05
One area I could start to think about, and I'm sure there's lots of issues with it still, but is like the the cow industry, for example, and how, you know, it was, it has been very exploitive for a long time. But maybe because of the recognition that some people have on how cheap chocolate comes to happen, how overabundance of chocolate comes to happen, then, you know, there's been more demand for socially conscious products. And there's, you know, starting to be at least some governments, for example, Costa Rica, really looks at a rainforest as resources, and its local population as something to center on. And so they, they work that through with some of the products they export, as well. And so, I don't know, at least from my one time, very limited experience in Costa Rica, the ecotourism piece was so big, and it was it felt much more authentic than ecotourism. I've done in other places, where, you know, actual locals that were paid well, and were like, excited to do to learn and to teach people about their ecosystems of, you know, the particularly like the cloud rainforest, for example. It feels so much supportive and all-encompassing than you know, let's, I don't know, put all the animals in a cage and charge a lot of money to Yeah, I'm doing zoos, sorry, zoos.
Tania 14:49
But it's kind of true. I mean, you can kind of look in any direction right now. If you want to talk about agriculture and regenerative agriculture as opposed to extractive, soil-depleting, if you don't mind, I'm going to start a little more local. For me, yeah. What about California agriculture? They say that we have a very limited, maybe 10 years in some of the more intensively farmed areas of California, left in in the soil, like we've extracted and destroyed the soil, we need a ton of water to keep down the alkaline, like the salts that have been that have come up from the way that we've been irrigating our crops, it wasn't Congress that made that Dust Bowl, don't listen to the signs on the 5 [Interstate].
Alexis 15:38
I know the signs you're talking about.
Tania 15:40
Yeah, it was not Congress that decided to do agriculture the way that we did. So when you have a regenerative, not monoculture agriculture, where you're building soil, and you are not drenching it with pesticides that give people cancer who work on your fields, you have trees, you have pollinators that are healthy, you have microorganisms in the soil, that break down the nutrients for our food to actually have nutrients in it when we eat them. Because the food that we eat is not even nutrient-rich anymore. Because where's it going to get these nutrients, out of thin air? So when you do that our soil is a carbon capture. When you take care of people, where is when people have the opportunity to do small farming, as opposed to mega-corporate, like bottom-line-based farming, where the bottom line does not take into account the relationship of humans with the land, the relationship of the like microorganisms with the crops, with the elements. like there's all these, this whole system is destroyed by this perspective of “we're going to get as much as we can this one time, and then we're going to put as much as we could and fight off all the other life in order to get that one thing that we want,” like that is destroying our capacity to grow food. When you have like small farms, and people are close to the land, they know what's happening on their own land, and are actually thinking about how do we build soil? How do we have a farm that works for my great-grandchildren? There's a completely different mindset. And that's just one way that we actually fight climate change and environmental and like, like terrible pollution that's giving people terrible diseases. I mean, there's Gosh, one of our upcoming episodes in our Docu-series will be on Black-owned farming, urban and rural. So there's, there's a little teaser there. Also, when it comes to urban, like food deserts, when we are working with people to bring healthier food into a community and give people the opportunity, the space, the space of time and energy and just land in order to grow food. That is I mean, that's the key and at Breathe, we're really eager to: yes, we work in politics, we will definitely be defending communities from terrible contamination and sea level rise inundating that contamination. We're definitely all about that. We also always, most importantly, are here to support communities that are modeling the alternative.
Alexis 18:57
Yes, like getting away from this “What is our Q2 look like?” That sort of mindset in the agriculture, right? It's that same mindset, it might not be necessarily like, “Q2,” it might be, you know, this particular season. You're right that extractive agriculture doesn't look long-term, it just looks to what is this particular season.
Tania 19:20
I mean, the system is destroying itself because it's all dependent, so much on speculation about the future. Like it's just like the financial markets. I mean, it's part and parcel, everything is leveraged and it's falling apart because the climate crisis means climate is no longer a thing and we get what we get, and it's very, it's very stochastic. We're encountering terrible unpredictability changes in you know, how the seasons turn up. And when they happen, like when storms happen, and you know, we're losing our crops. So you can't be speculative. It's like chaotic market, climate chaos is not good for the way that our profit-driven society has built agriculture as a business.
Linet 20:09
So one of our guests that we've had on the pod before the 559 Mural Project, their focus is on the Central Valley. And they're similarly doing art activism, based specifically around murals for local communities in the Central Valley. And one of the things that I learned from them is how that food desert situation like the Central Valley of California, for so much produce gets made, and the people that are doing all the labor out there, actually don't have access to a lot of that produce that they just picked. So there's like, serious issues of food deserts and equality, there's a lot of like, purposely ignoring the history and the culture of the area, where, you know, it used to have a much larger Black population, and they all got pushed out on purpose. And, you know, now there's a much larger Latinx population, but they're really not represented in positions of power, it just sort of compiles into each other, right? Like, the access to food, the protections for a hazardous work, right, like working the farm is during the pandemic, during fire season, you know, all of this stuff is really interconnected.
Tania 21:31
So when there is instability, who is impacted the most in our society? I mean, COVID was a really excellent laboratory to illustrate this point, is that it's the most vulnerable, marginalized populations that are impacted most deeply when there's instability. And that is what the climate crisis is bringing us this incredible instability.
Linet 21:56
How did you land on Breathe? What took you there? Were you like, really into art? And then you're like, actually, art has activism or there's, you know, I see a lot of are in activism, and I'm an activist, and I want to bridge these two, and sort of from that, like, what is like the future of Breathe?
Tania 22:18
So yes, I definitely started long, like a lifelong active activist. I mean, I think the thing that motivated me the most, when I was a little kid, was saving the forests from humans. I mean, it was, I've just, I've been an activist since forever, doing very many very different approaches, from electoral politics to socialist organizations to, you know, my, actually, the band that I play with started off as protest band, like it was, you know, the beat for people who are marching. So there's a lot of different arenas or directions at which I've approached activism from which I've approached activism. And for me, personally, since you're asking about me, personally, there's an amazing confluence of just the various really disparate sort of worlds I've lived in and experienced and worked in, that have together in Breathe. And of course, it makes sense because I've definitely strong hand in designing Breathe. So it's been relatively recently, in the last five years that I've gotten to more Art-ivist projects, where we've done like public art in the streets of San Francisco say, to bring attention to things like what's happening in Syria, for instance, I've been traveling in a circle, or working in a circle of amazing experiential, immersive artists, which is actually how I know Alexis. And circle, yeah, it's like, it's circles, it circles upon circles. And there's a strong desire in this community, I believe, to take the work that we do and really share it with the world. So activism first, art second, but it's a close second. My dear friend, Ken Greenstein, I had just actually, he had just read a piece that I'd written about communities of color and psychedelics, and what the psychedelic communities have to offer when it comes to racial justice. And he was like, very insistent that I come to this first meeting about Breathe. If we want to branch into this topic of racial justice in the psychedelic Renaissance, or on racial equity, I've had the privilege to be able to support some really amazing projects that are happening in that space. Like the People of Color Psychedelic Collective, People of Technicolor, which are People-of-Color-only spaces. There is an incredible amount of healing work that is definitely required. It's on the table, it's mandatory to accomplish racial equity and racial justice, that can be particularly just beautifully served with psychedelics and like just consciousness shifting work. And that is, historically very early, just, I mean, the war on drugs, I will say that the war on drugs, where it is not a safe place, communities of color, are really the least served by psychotherapy. And it's a really amazing place to be breaking through. And also, a lot of the psychedelic traditions come from communities of color. There's a lot to work on there too. And it's definitely a big part of my working life, also, alongside Breathe.
Alexis 26:18
And with that, this is a good time to go to break. So we'll have a couple of quick announcements from Seth, and then we'll be right back.
Seth 26:32
Hi, everyone, this is Seth and I am one of the audio editors and volunteers here at UBP. The Unconscious Bias Project brings creative, accessible, evidence-based solutions for unintentional bias to academic, technological, governmental organizations, and beyond. We sustain a welcoming home for inquisitive and creative minds and encourage a growth mindset. Working by the model of “0% Guilt, 100% Empowerment.” Please subscribe or follow our Facebook and Instagram for the latest in events and how you can learn more and be involved. Also, take a look and check out our guest's website and learn more. Look for that information in the description section of your podcast or on our website.
Alexis 27:27
So again, we are talking with Tania Abdul about Breathe. And there's so much amazing stuff to talk about here. So Tania, can you tell us a little bit more about who does Breathe work with and what kinds of projects are you involved in right now?
Tania 27:45
Oh, it's so exciting. I'm so glad you asked. Okay, we are a fledgling organization, I'm going to say that right now are at this point really focusing on proving our concept. So awesome, can gain the ability to hire amazing folks and, and really begin to spread our network across this country across the engaged world of people. So we're starting, most of us being one degree of separation from Ken Greenstein, we are most of us Bay Area-based on the place of strength. We are working with: Green Action for Health and Environmental Justice have fantastic organization led by a man named Bradley Angel. They have a long history since the 90s of working with marginalized communities of color. A lot of different Native Americans, and different are my Native American groups, and also BIPOC folks in the Bay Area and in especially in Palo Alto and Bayview Hunters Point, they were a big partner of ours and have brought us in on our first episode of our Docu-series that we're working on is, it's focused on the Bayview Hunters Point and the Treasure Island communities fight with the Superfund sites with the US Navy, basically, and the US EPA, and it's heartstoppingly devastating the story that we're helping to publicize, that it's not an unknown story, but it is also, it's amazing that people in San Francisco just don't realize how ongoing contamination is and the poisoning of the local like residents and the plans they have a really shockingly terrible. So Breathe has been instrumental in helping to build a coalition. It's called, it's a mouthful. It's called the San Francisco Bay Shoreline Contamination Cleanup Coalition or sfbayshorelinecleanupcoalition.org. Actually, it's sfbayshorelineccc.org. Anyways, we're working with amazing groups that are working in both environmental justice on shoreline communities all around the San Francisco Bay, clean up the toxic waste before it gets inundated with seawater as the water levels rise and also groundwater cuz that's what happens, changes groundwater levels as the sea level rise happens. So very scary future that we're facing here and across the planet really. But this is where we work and where we live right now. We are also working with an incredible organization called Hip Hop for Change, headed by Khafre Jay. They actually, Khafre Jay grew up in Bayview Hunters Point. And they've recently been, they have a new base, a new studio. They're mostly Oakland-based up until recently, and now they have one also in Hunters Point. They are an incredible organization. And they're absolutely all about climate justice and environmental justice. They do events around the environment, and the excellent partners, wonderful partners, we are also working with soon to be working with a group of Pomo elders, or at least one particular Pomo band and around Clear Lake in Lake County, who recently had the first in generational memory meeting of elders of all the different bands around the lake, which is a really important convening. If you can imagine how incredibly traumatized communities, like how much trouble and chaos can happen within like inter-community-wise, when you've been subjugated, and massacred, and poisoned. It's really important that these groups have a relationship, these relationships have definitely been strained in the past. So there's an amazing work that's happening there. And I'm hoping to help tell the story of what's been going on in Clear Lake, where the bloodiest most horrific massacre of native peoples happened that I don't think a lot of people knew about, in brief. So it's the Pomo people the extended Pomo land up in Clear Lake, Lake County, California. At one point they were forced onto an island on the lake a large number of people and I wish I knew the number off the top of my head but I don't but and they were just all massacred women, children incredibly bloody piece of California history that nobody knows about. God, this is hard to talk about. It's really important for us to hear about these things and there has been this terrible mine that has poisoned the lake, the lake is toxic. Now it's, I mean, it's readily beautiful lake while and for a large portion of the year now because it's so toxic, poisoned. There's just these terrible algae blooms that make it impossible to fish. So the subsistence, you know, food source for the Pomo bands, the historical food sources is destroyed. Of course, it's the typical story, European American settlement, settler colonialism has really hurt that land. And the people are there they they have a story and they have ways and ideas for how to rebuild, like to regenerate the land. And they deserve all of our attention and resources to lead that we need them. I am very much myself personally working on moving from the high-pressure culture of like, boom, boom, boom, get it done, make the accomplishments, like find the bottom line and like maximize optimize, I, I grew up very much in that mindset. And when we work we talk with elders of color, particularly indigenous elders, they teach us that that is not actually going to lead to good results, it's not going to lead to good outcomes. One of the amazing partnerships we've recently, Breathe recently worked with is we're building is with the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, which is a network of city government-level sustainability directors throughout the US and Canada. And this organization is really progressive and beautiful. They really get the climate puzzle is not just about numbers, like pounds of carbon and you know, degrees Celsius and you know, it's about human relationships with land. It's a really a fantastic network. And the group that we presented with, this wonderful pair looked at our line and Juanita Brown of Courageous Leadership. They taught that when we are in the red zone of stress of this flight, fear flight, appease, I forget all the acronyms no but when we're in that, that cortisol-drenched mode of stress and fear and feeling like we're in trauma, and we need to fix something right away, it's an emergency situation. We see people as cardboard cutouts are two-dimensional, they don't, we don't see the humanity in those that we think are opposed to us. We don't come up with the solutions that are generous and generative. If we go from this red zone mentality into action, our action choices are going to be determined from the mindset that we carry with us from that fear, flight, fight mode, we need to bring ourselves to a green zone of connection, and healing and generosity and community. When we come from that perspective, when we can shift our mindset into that one where we were able to connect with each other on our values, then move to the action plan, that our actions are going to be so much more effective, you know, actually accomplish the things that we really want them to accomplish.
Alexis 35:57
Yeah, it's like, you look at all these corporations, where I forget who it is that like, supposedly had the motto “move fast and break things.” It's like, well, yeah, when you move when your mindset is “move fast and break things,” you're gonna break things. If you literally have as part of your mindset and your motto, like “consequences be damned” repercussions. You know, second, third, fourth degree repercussions be damned. And like, this is what you end up with.
Linet 36:28
Wow, Mark Zuckerberg, I don't know how more perfect that is that you brought that up? Talking about California and climate and people and sustainability and moving from the red to the green? Yeah, we need space there. There needs to be space. You know, honestly, it's one of the things that it is the reality that we you know, we live in this, like, in the capitalist context, we would prefer not to be in the, how can we be more efficient, but everybody needs to, you know, some way to sustain ourselves. But the more like you said, the more we make space to move from the red to the green zone, the better. And it's kind of one of the things that I actually really love about the podcasts, although every time I'm like, oh, no, I've got a book, like a whole chunk of my day, just to set up for the podcast just to do you know, and we do like the listening and such as editing. And then we create a flyer. And then we think about how we're going to publish it. And we pick out quotes, and that's a lot to put into the podcast, but every single time. Like, we finished recording the podcast, and it feels amazing, because we sat and we dedicated time to listen, to learn to connect. I think it's so powerful. I want to 1000 billion percent agree with you, Tania.
Tania 37:53
Oh, thanks. Yeah, that sounds amazing. I'm listening deeply, because I have suddenly become a video editor for this documentary series that I'm producing. And it's, it's really challenging. It's really challenging. There's so much material that's beautiful that will not fit into my 20 minute episode. But yes, it's just I need to just spend a far greater amount of time with it than I originally thought. Like I said, this is, I'm a work in progress. I'm learning better, I hope, how to how to accept the pace, like the real pace of things of change, to build something takes time that my mom once taught me this lesson when I was very, very young, I think I was four, we built this whole craft thing for Christmas. And it was really pretty. And it was like lots of yarn, it was on this whole board. It was just all this whole thing that I can't even remember exactly what it looked like. And she said, remember how long it took us to make this. And then she ripped it apart. And it took her like five seconds. And she said it's so fast to destroy something, you can destroy something so fast. But it takes a long time to make something.
Alexis 39:13
That's like one of my favorite podcasts just made the point you know, they’ll televise, “You know, oh, we're blowing up a building. And we're, you know, demolishing the building,” that can get televised, but you would never televise the five years it's going to take to rebuild the next building that's going to be there. Right. Right. So easy and fast to destroy.
Linet 39:37
I actually think about that a lot because my son I have a four year old and they are in the process of learning about causing harm and repair. Hmm. So I'm sure everybody with a kid, or you know, just even in relationship, right, like you're going to eventually harm that you can't always prevent any single possible harm. That's just not it's not practical. It's not like it's just not how it works. But yeah, learning to express yourself without immediately like causing harm, like the reactionary piece, or even just understanding like, Oh, if you want to have friends, right, like, you can't hit somebody like that, it's not going to help you become friends with them. And, you know, it's something that we all, I think, most of us anyways, I definitely had to learn growing up, you know, to build relationships with people, but it's still something that, you know, we talked to this day in our workshops and with our clients is like, you can't always be roses. And it's important to know, just as much as when everything is roses, what you want to do, as well as when things are not like when you when people cause harm, like what do you want to do? How do you want to proceed, you know, like, not just ignore it, but like, hey, let's, let's actually do something about it.
Tania 41:06
I think that a lot of folks recognize that activism, and actually success and activism and movement building, it's all relational. Our main asset is our relationships. And it takes time, it takes work to build a relationship, you can't walk in, and assume that because you have good intentions, and you want to be helpful, that you can walk away with a relationship that you can depend on that people are going to be there. And you're going to be there for each other. There's, it's a dance, it's like building trust is, is something that takes time, it's the same same situation like you, we need to be built on something. I think that a lot of us who feel this pressure, this impending pressure of like, what's happening across the planet, with our environment, it's just a it's just, we feel like we're in a pressure cooker right now. And it's really hard to encompass that relationships still take time to build something that we're really working to find like the path. How do we help people build relationships that will glue a movement together? Everything I've been taught as an activist is that we need catalytic moments to work together where we show up for each other and begin to build that trust.
Linet 42:28
Why is it so important to to work with each other as opposed to everybody just kind of like doing their own thing and be like, Oh, it'll all work out yet?
Tania 42:38
Well, one of the main reasons, and it's particularly obvious when it comes to politics, but it's not as obvious when it comes to some other other sort of zones of progress, I guess, our power is our numbers. That is I mean, it's just like, lesson A1 of activism. We are not typically, you know, the well-funded, well-financed, you know, side of the coin, it's usually about bringing mass numbers of voices people to support a particular initiative. So for that obvious reason, we need each other in order to pressure, the halls of power. And in everything that we do, whether it's, you know, creating a community garden, that feeds young people in a school, or building a labor bank, for instance, it's so much about pooling our resources, from the very, very small examples all the way up to how are we going to save the Amazonian rainforest. It's not really possible, I don't believe to make very much headway on any one particular issue without a whole lot of other pieces of the puzzle coming, like coming into place. So for instance, the example that I use sometimes is if you want to make a difference with childhood asthma rates, in communities of color, you can't just try to fight the local polluters and get them to shut their situation down. In order to do that in order to actually make a difference and regulate local polluters. You need to talk about voting, right reform, voting reform, you know who's who's in office, you need to to manage incredible levels of, of political power to manage to wield and when you're talking about marginalized communities and health outcomes for children, we also need to talk about the fact that so many of them are single parent families, homes, because of the incarceration, the mass incarceration that that has happened and what it's like for their other health factors, like the food, the nutrition, and what happens when they go to the doctor. You know, what happens when a person of color goes to the doctor is very different experience. There's just so many different places that like children's health requires us to work in so many different fronts. intersectional solidarities, absolutely called for.
Alexis 45:23
We have our shout-out section. So we, of course know about Breathe, this shout-out section is also an opportunity for you, Tania to let us know about anything else you've got going on people you want to think, or any of other resources or projects that you want to highlight, in addition to, you know, all of the great things that you've already told us about today, that I definitely have a reading list now.
Tania 45:47
Alexis and Linet, thank you so so much for this opportunity. And I, Breathe is here to shout out about other projects. This is our entire raison d'etre. And it's gonna keep going, and we're just going to be shouting out about, about amazing, innovative frontline heroes in communities everywhere, forever as we do. So, certainly starting with the Breathe network Facebook group, or our Instagram, Breathe for Justice, we're working on an action digest, action event digest. So that will be literally shouting out a whole lot of really cool things every week, if not twice a week. Right now, I really want to thank Green Action for Health and Environmental Justice. And their work that has led us to be in relationship with the Mothers and Fathers Committee, the Bayview Hunters Point Mothers and Fathers Committee, also our partners Hip Hop for Change. They're just incredibly inspiring, and they really deserve your support. We've been recently in relationship with the USDA, and as I mentioned, the Urban Sustainability Directors Network and our coalition, o we've been building this coalition, the San Francisco Bay Shoreline Contamination Cleanup Coalition. We are currently working on a regional workshop for everybody in the Bay. To learn more about its there's a number of government agencies that are really important to dealing with contamination and preparing for sea level rise, including the Department of Toxic Substance Substances Control, it's a California agency, that is something that all of us should know about that most of us don't. There's a number of really amazing organizations that will be there. And it's a really great opportunity to learn how to make sure that we are ready and that we are doing we need to do. We are talking about intense radioactive and toxic waste on our shorelines. So in Richmond, the Sunflower Alliance and Climate Reality Project, is it especially the Bay Area chapter. They're doing amazing work. SF Baykeeper. Oh, there's so many I could go on. But I probably should stop. And then up in Richmond with the AstraZeneca site, there's just a really, incredibly tangled situation with property development and our top and even down to city levels of government, including Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom. And their actual relationships, like family relationships with the people who are building condos on radioactive waste as fast as possible. And they're not removing it. They're just putting a little cap on it, leaving it there for later. But that with the advice of just don't garden people don't garden. Yes, so the list goes on. I just want to direct everybody's attention to our social media. And you'll get to hear even more as we continue to roll across the country, including Tohono O'odham people whose reservation land is been bisected by this border wall that has destroyed a little bit of like access to water in a very, very dry land. We're also talking with the Southern Ute group in the Ute Mountain area of Utah. And what's happening with the uranium mill, they're just really recently gotten much more active. And then we'll be in cancer alley in Louisiana and East Texas, talking with African American farmers. We've started to work together and Breathe is the Hunter's Point Biomonitoring Project. It is going to change the way that environmental justice happens across this country instead of measuring the pollution in the soil or the water or the air and making some kind of guesstimate on what's okay and what's clean and what's what's safe or not. Because really it is a shot in the dark. We need to be measuring the pollution that's in people, Dr. Sumchai is doing your analysis of people, residents around the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. And she is finding incredible levels of arsenic of lead of terrible toxic things that come very much from the shipyard she can identify the soil particles, like the soil elements that are definitely coming from the Navy's activity to quote unquote, “clean up the shipyard” and prepare it for property development. And the terrible new radionuclides, like terrible levels of radioactive material in the people around the shipyard who were living there right now. But this project, when we start monitoring the pollution in people and creating a toxic registry, like we have for the World Trade Center workers and for veterans of our wars in the Middle East, we track the health impacts from the exposures that they experienced, and take care of those people. We are going to actually know what is safe and when something is clean, and when it's not, and actually do it right. So let Dr. Sumchai is doing is absolutely what breathe wants to support and amplify. It's called the Hunters Point Biomonitoring Project. And out in North Carolina, it goes on the list goes on.
Linet 51:20
Thank you so much, Tania, this was incredible. I really, really appreciate you coming on to our pod. Alexis, thank you so much for being like, “oh, we need to invite them. This would be a great idea for the podcast” is awesome. Truly, I'm so thankful. And if there's other ways that UBP and our followers can support your work, do reach out to us. Let us know when your documentary drops. We'd love to amplify it. That'd be great.
Alexis 51:54
Yeah, thank you so much for joining us.
Tania 51:56
Oh, it's such a pleasure. Such a pleasure. I'm so enamored with the work that you're doing. Thank you so so much. It's all about the stories. Storytelling.
Alexis 52:05
Yep. That's a big thing. We keep coming back around to thank you listeners for tuning in. We'll talk to you again soon.
Seth 52:16
Thanks for listening. You can find more information and donate at unconsciousbiasproject.org. Dr. Linet Mera, she/her, and Alexis Krohn, she/her, are your hosts. Seth Boeckman, he/they, is your editor. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to this podcast and follow us. We can be found on Facebook at Unconscious Bias Project, Twitter at UBP_stem, LinkedIn, Instagram, or join our mailing list. UBP is a fiscally sponsored project of the Social Good Fund, a tax-deductible 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. If you wish to sponsor us, please contact us in the contact us tab at unconsciousbiasproject.org.