Reflecting on October at the Climate Museum Pop-Up

By John Linstrom, Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum

October is a delicious month in New York City, and I have found myself relishing it more than usual after the abnormally long heatwave that we New Yorkers, along with many others around the Northern Hemisphere, endured in August. As the trees have finally begun to turn, I remain rattled by those weeks on end of temperatures in the 90s—how will I explain that sense of uncanny, temperature-driven foreboding to my daughter, who is now just eight months old, as she grows up? I try to take comfort in the normalcy of these falling leaves, although the more I think about it, the more I worry they are behind schedule. Meanwhile, nothing has grounded me more, or staved off that biting anxiety more, than my new regular commutes into Lower Manhattan to The Climate Museum Pop-Up at 120 Wooster in Soho.

I am only three months into my two-year fellowship with the Climate Museum, but my approach to thinking about climate change has already been expanded and honed by the brief immersion. The pop-up’s opening, and the programs that have come along with it, have begun to provide a sort of “proof of concept” for our theory of change. Central to that theory is the idea that we need places to come together in community around the arts and around good information to reinforce the understanding that we do have climate agency, that we aren’t alone, and that good work is being done that we can all support right now.

I thought it was fitting, for that reason, that our very first public program after opening the pop-up on October 8 was a panel featuring local leaders on the front lines of the fight for climate justice here in New York. On October 10, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we were joined by Secretary of the Shinnecock Council of Trustees Kelly Dennis and Director of the Shinnecock Nation Environmental Department Shavonne Smith, who spoke with museum director Miranda Massie to a packed house about their work on behalf of the Shinnecock Nation on the East End of Long Island. The Shinnecock are a community in direct danger from sea level rise—they have inhabited and stewarded the land and waters on the South Fork of Long Island for some 13,000 years, a geologic timespan hard if not impossible to grasp, but that very land could vanish below the Atlantic in less than a short century due to the melting glaciers and rising seas that are resulting from anthropogenic climate change.

The stakes are high, globally and locally, for the Shinnecock, as they are for us all. Shavonne, the Environmental Director for the Shinnecock Nation, described working to build the tribe’s resilience through nature-based methods while also lowering carbon output in ways that contribute to the global transition we need, but such work can be threatened by very local forces: she also described the land being cleared around the edges of the neighboring town of Southampton to make way for mansions that stand empty most of the year, gazing out to the sea with that hollow, frozen shriek that all empty buildings possess. In contrast to such displays of conspicuous consumption, Kelly described the small community that has recently grown around the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers initiative, a “multi-generation collective of six women who are enrolled members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, leveraging our 10,000+-year-old traditional relationship with the sea and with seaweed to capture carbon and nitrogen that has poisoned the waters of Shinnecock Bay and beyond.” It is hard not to catch the energy and excitement of collective action like that, and it reinforced the importance of the Land Back movement and the idea of climate reparations, in a world in which 80% of the world’s biodiversity is protected by Indigenous communities comprising 5% of the human population. The IPCC has recognized the critical role of Indigenous communities in the mitigation of climate change, but that role will depend on the extension of and respect for sovereignty rights and on reparative justice.

The artist David Opdyke, whose monumental postcard mural Someday, all this is featured in our pop-up, spoke this month in his artist’s talk with Dr. Una Chaudhuri (Dean of Humanities at NYU and a climate scholar and activist) about the importance of community and collective action. His work captures something of the perils of a world in which community can’t come together or act from a place of self-determination—the landscape in his mural twists about itself and pulls apart in a kind of centrifugal motion as climate refugees fill repurposed cruise ships of a century ago (variously titled the Ark, the Ark II, etc.) and every port seems adorned with signs warning those refugees to stay away. The result is a world in which the humans (and there are many depicted) seem to have lost their agency entirely to the nonhuman world—giant caterpillars devour a city, a butterfly sabotages and tears apart a billionaire’s escape rocket to Mars, and monster crows pick apart what threads are left holding things together—and everyone is traveling without anyone seeming to know the destination. It’s a dire picture, although tempered by the artist’s witty sense of humor.

David doesn’t want his viewers to leave his work depressed or hopeless, and he expressed in the conversation how critical the other half of the pop-up is: the Climate Action Incubator, where visitors move from the introspection invited by David’s mural to a series of information, actions, and opportunities to commit to further action, all meant to increase their sense of climate agency. The information centers around some new social science on the myth of American climate denialism, which surprises many of our visitors—a full supermajority, about two-thirds, of Americans support bold, Green New Deal-esque action on climate, but the popular perception is the exact opposite, that such desire for action is outnumbered 2 to 1. In other words, most of us walk around in a false social reality, thinking that we are in a minority that is actually a supermajority, which makes it easy to feel hopeless about the possibility for change. I find that the reversal of this false social reality is especially well illustrated by one of the most popular action stations in the incubator, the action wall, where visitors select one or more climate actions to take outside of the pop-up space and slap a brightly colored sticker declaring the action commitment onto the wall. The explosion of color that has begun to emerge represents just what a robust community of climate action we are actually all a part of as we leave the space.

For me, the most delightful example of this sort of community of climate action came with our first three high school workshops that we held at the pop-up last month. The first and third, focusing on climate communication through theater, were led by Climate Museum Senior Advisor and Teaching Artist Darian Dauchan. I had the pleasure of co-leading the other workshop, which focused on poetry writing. We were joined by NYU climate scientist Dr. Sonali McDermid, who answered students’ questions about climate change and asked them to reflect on their own memories of Hurricane Sandy; David Opdyke, who spoke about his creative process and his thoughts about art’s power to inspire community around activism; and Climate Museum Youth and Public Programs Coordinator Prisca Dognon, who helped students break the creative ice with some theatrical exercises. I gave a brief introduction to the little-known genre of the “postcard poem”—poetry short enough to be written directly onto the back of a postcard, meant to channel the writer’s thoughts toward a recipient without a great deal of revision or refinement but utilizing the tools of poetic imagery and lyricism—and provided a few strategies for the students’ own writing. Then they wrote bite-sized climate poems on postcards reproduced from David’s mural, addressed to their elected officials in Washington and Albany.

The poems the students wrote in a relatively compressed time were deeply moving, plumbing the range of human emotion from despair to resolve and even hope, rife with vivid imagery and sensory detail. As some of them read their poems at the end of the workshop, it took me back to a moment at the pop-up’s opening reception near the beginning of the month, when our director Miranda Massie stood flanked by a graduate of the museum’s high school internship program on one side and youth climate podcaster Rosalee Gioia on the other, reminding us both that the movement for climate justice is a movement for intergenerational justice and promising the two young people that their generation would not be alone in the fight. The postcard poetry workshop was an opportunity for those of us in older generations to try to live up to the promise Miranda made then, and whatever gifts we were able to bring to that circle of community were equally matched by the gifts of creativity and purpose that the group of young poets brought with them.

As a new parent of an eight-month-old daughter, I think about that promise often. We all need to be taking advantage of whatever spaces we can create in our lives for intersectional community, because we need those spaces to put our creative brains together to build structures for justice and healing of people and the planet. Each time a visitor crunches through the falling leaves outside to enter our new pop-up space in Soho, I’m grateful to The Climate Museum for the opportunity to welcome another creative human into the beloved community we are trying to build together around that fleeting space during these three months—a little refuge for allyship, for challenging and being challenged, and for the creation of a new future, a new and more hopeful narrative.