Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 193: The Climate Imaginary: The art shaped shape hole in tHe climate crisis — with Kendra fanconi
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Debbie C, Alex Masse, Kendra Fanconi, Steve Tornes
[nature sounds]
[theme music]
Kathy Feng 00:14
Welcome to ‘The Climate Imaginary,’ a Below the Radar series. As we navigate our future within the ongoing climate emergency, we seek different frameworks to help guide our learning and our actions. In this series, we bring together guests from across artistic and academic disciplines to speak about their approaches to working in solidarity amidst the climate crisis. We feature conversations that range from the unique power of creative works to mobilise people, to the importance of collaboration and interdependence across fields.
Debbie C 00:53
Hello listeners! I’m Debbie C with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of our Below the Radar series: The Climate Imaginary, Steve Tornes and Alex K Masse are joined by Kendra Fanconi, the Artistic Director of The Only Animal, a Vancouver-based theatre company that creates immersive work arising from a deep engagement with place. They discuss her company’s work in greening the theatre sector, creating a cohort of 100 climate-focused artists, as well as the unique role art has in combating climate grief and presenting creative solutions. Enjoy the episode!
Alex Masse 01:38
Hey folks, welcome back to Below the Radar. I'm Alex K Masse and I am here with Steve Tornes and also, our lovely guest, Kendra Fanconi. Hello, Kendra. It is an absolute joy to have you on the podcast.
Kendra Fanconi 01:52
it's a joy to be here with you. Thanks for the invitation.
Alex Masse 01:56
Of course. For the sake of our listeners who might not be familiar with you and your work, what would you like them to know?
Kendra Fanconi 02:03
My name is Kendra Fanconi. I'm the artistic director of The Only Animal and we're a theatre company that works with a deep engagement with place and for solutionary outcomes for the climate crisis. I'm joining you today through the power of Zoom, but from my home, which is on the traditional unceded and ancient territories of the Sechelt and Squamish First Nations, also known as the Sunshine Coast, and it is indeed sunny out today and a nice collaboration. I would be outside in my garden, if my Wi-Fi stretched that far.
Steve Tornes 02:38
Thank you. One thing we know that you've been introducing into the work you do for our society deep in the Anthropocene, is alongside land acknowledgments, a sort of climate acknowledgement, touching on, when we are, in addition to, where we are. Could you tell us a little bit about that practice?
Kendra Fanconi 02:56
Yeah, I'm part of a national group on art and climate called SCALE, which stands for Sectoral Climate Arts Leadership for the Emergency. And I remember being in a SCALE roundtable meeting, there might have been 80 people there. And somebody came up with the idea, they said, kind of like, “Hey, why aren’t we doing climate acknowledgments at our art events,” and I was immediately just taken with the idea, we should remember whose it was originally. But whoever you are out there, I thank you for putting forward this idea. And we started experimenting with it as a company, not only at arts events actually, but at board meetings or project meetings, any time where we're going to be making decisions, because it's very easy in our current society, which doesn't really acknowledge climate reality. That is that we're in the precious last decade, what the UN calls, the Decade of Action, where we still have the ability to keep our planet below 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise, and that we must dedicate ourselves entirely to that transition, which is a cultural transition as much as it is an energy transition or a climate transition. And so, we wanted to kind of make sure that we were taking a moment to check in with that climate reality and say, here we are, and we're going to make some decisions today. And let's try to make decisions that are part of the solution. So, the idea of climate acknowledgment can be a lot of different things. And I think that the variety of ways in which one can acknowledge the climate is part of the beauty of the idea. I'm actually working with a cellist who's based in the Netherlands who's taking bird songs from species that have recently disappeared, and turning them into elegies. You know, birdsong melodies are very, very quick, mostly. And slowing them down and playing them by cello as a part of climate acknowledgement. Climate acknowledgement might look like checking in with the Indigenous leaders in the area that you're in and asking what Indigenous led climate action looks like right in this moment. It might be referencing a recent IPCC report, or looking at a recent climate event, which so often were brought into our climate reality by extreme weather events. And you might reference that as a way of saying, hey, look, right now, this is our climate shifting, and what are we going to do with these small precious lives we have. I remember one small climate acknowledgment that just passed to me in a phone meeting with one of my company members who said to me, in March one year, “Hey, have you noticed there are no puddles this year? “And I was like, “Oh, there are no puddles”. And he said, “Yeah, the water tables are so low that even though we've had a whole winter of rain, we don't have high enough ground water to have puddles.” And that was a little climate acknowledgment for me, things are changing. And I want to pay attention to that.
Steve Tornes 06:01
Just on a side note there. One of my roommates who recently immigrated to Canada to study just a few years ago, at one point, she was talking to one of her friends, and the friends were asking about wildfires and the smoke, and my roommate said, “Oh, you don't have to worry about that. It happens every year here. This is actually completely normal.” And to me, that was my own climate acknowledgment that, on one hand, we're adaptable. But we all have very different baselines of normal depending on when you were born or when you moved to the area.
Kendra Fanconi 06:34
That's right. There's actually a theory called the Theory of the Diminishing Baseline that says you can only remember back in your own timeframe of your life. So, I can't actually, as someone who was born in 1970, I can't remember what the pre-1970 world was actually like. And in coming to a new country, which I actually did, I'm an immigrant to Canada as well. I don't have a reference before 1996 what life was like here. And I think that's part of the reason why following Indigenous led climate action is so important, because the people who have been on this land for 10,000 years or more, have a deep knowledge of what harmony looks like in this land, that I'll never know, as someone who immigrated as an adult to Canada.
Alex Masse 07:23
Yeah, I imagine that's also important, you know, as more and more people are born into the way that the climate crisis is now because I was born in 2000. And all I can really remember are record high after record high. And the baseline for me was probably more record highs. So, it really is important to be able to go back and have those memories passed down as just that's kind of like a freeze frame of how things could be and how things were because a lot of us don't have that memory within us anymore, because of just how much things have changed.
Kendra Fanconi 07:57
Yeah, I really see that as part of the work of the artists in this moment, because artists are visionaries. And so, they can help us see what we can't see, what it's like on the other side of the carbon transition, what would it look like to live in that fossil free future? And Alex, I hope in your life, you do know that. I hope that we create that together, wouldn't that be a powerful thing to have lived through the transition of knowing what it was like on this brink? And seeing a restored world, what they call the Ecozoic Era that would follow the Anthropocene and the Ecozoic era is marked by the idea of humans being in balance with natural systems. So, to be able to come through this crisis and into that balance, and how would that change our relationship with the earth, with each other, in the kind of building of a culture of care, and that's the artist’s part of it. We don't carry every part of this transition, obviously. But we're in a culture of consumerism. So, if we want to move to a culture of stewardship, or a culture of care, and we are the culture makers, so it's our job to re-frame our society to tell new stories, to imagine new ways forward, to act differently. Because humans are part of nature, we're not some separate alien life form. We're not machines, we are nature. So how can we act and call upon that human nature to create a new future ourselves?
Steve Tornes 09:32
So, we know how busy you are, you have so much going on with a lot of your climate work, with a lot of your art. You have the Artists Brigade, the Only Animal you also organize Greenhouse Field Trips. Could you describe some of these projects? And tell us about what you think have been some of the highlights of this work so far?
Kendra Fanconi 09:51
Yeah, I'd love to. So, The Only Animals is a 17-year-old company. And even though we're based as a theatre company, it's funny how theatre is an art form that holds so many other art forms within it. So, we've worked with dancers and sculptors and conceptual artists of all kinds, with lighting, with set, with costumes with all kinds of different art forms that have introduced us to so many great artists over the years. So, we had the idea to form an Artist Brigade, that would bring arts and artists to the frontlines of the climate movement. And we have developed, sort of, methodology, a way of doing that. I know both of you are members of this year's Artists Brigade, a cohort of 100 artists from all different disciplines and all different stages of careers as well. And our idea was to begin together in the fall with the program Greenhouse that you mentioned, which was kind of a two-day intensive, was held within the COVID crisis, but outdoors at UBC botanical gardens. And we were able to kind of spend two days looking at our basic climate literacy, what's happening? And then what is the artist’s role and to look at that through a bunch of different lenses, so, from the activist lens, from Indigenous people’s lens, from academic lens, from practising artists. And then to be able to sort of stir up the ideas of how can we be most efficacious in our work? How can we make impact? How do we create change? We've continued to communicate with that Artists Brigade all year long in a series of weekly missives that kind of continue to engage around those kinds of questions and also opportunities. And now we're in the middle of a series of four field trips, which invites each of those artists to come with us into a place where they can either see the climate in crisis. For example, last month, we brought 25 artists up to the Songbird Forest, which is on Sechelt territory here on the Sunshine Coast. And it's a forest which is slated to be logged. So, we brought artists up there, we introduced them to the land, the hereditary chief of the Sechelt Nation greeted us and told us stories from that place from his boyhood, which were really beautiful. We met with the forest activists who are trying to save it. To meet the place properly, and then to be able to engage in conversations about what artists could do to help protect it. We also have a different group of artists, in Vancouver, a place called the EartHand Gleaners in Trillium Park. EartHand Gleaners do a lot of work with ancient fibre technologies and how we can all look to our own ancestry and the work of fibres in order to sort of tie ourselves to the work of right relations, in this place and time. On Friday, we'll be convening another group at Van Dusen gardens, and we're going to look at how you work with other people telling the climate story in society, academics, NGOs, or activist organisations. City of Vancouver are going to be there. And they're framing up, the different the hardest questions, they have the ones that they do want artists to come in on. One of the interesting questions from City of Vancouver is looking at the kind of extreme heat events that we've been having, and looking at how we build human infrastructure to better protect each other. In our neighbourhoods, in our buildings, on our blocks. Because we know that we're not doing a very good job, helping the most vulnerable in our communities survive these extreme heat events. So, it's interesting from those experiences, the artists will then have an opportunity to make pitches for their ideas with artistic engagement. And from that, we'll commission a series of works. And that's kind of like our first year at the Artists Brigade. We have many other plans for engaging that cohort, and also trying to measure our processes of how we're doing things with the Artist Brigade in order to scale it up to a national model.
Alex Masse 14:13
Yeah. So, to talk more about your work and you know, that work of integrating artists into the climate crisis, one phrase at the heart of a lot of this work that's really stuck with me, one that I remember hearing, like numerous times at the Greenhouse event was the phrase of the “Art shaped hole in the climate crisis,” and also the phrase of like, you know, “Artists as culture makers.” Do you think you could elaborate on that? What it really gives, like how we answer these difficult questions, how we help the climate crisis engage people more.
Kendra Fanconi 14:42
Yeah, the “art shaped hole in the climate crisis,” that phrase comes from the work of David Maggs, who's an academic who works at this intersection of art and climate, and a good friend. I guess I like the question, because it's kind of curious, and it lights up my imagination, which is the best thing that can happen for an artist, is for their imagination to get engaged. It's another way of kind of parsing, what is our work? I think a lot of times when we have an issue that we really care about, I really care about old growth forests, and preserving natural forests and intact ecosystems. And I work on those issues where I live, I want to get in there,and I want to save those forests. So, how do I do that work? There are lots of different modes of engagement. And David talks about these in his work, they're a good way of helping me to understand. So, mode one is the work of just greening the sector. So, I could just pay attention to my own life, and that I don't use paper and wood products. That would be a kind of response to my love of the forest. The second mode is kind of trying to raise the profile on the issue. So, if I had graphic design skills, I could make posters and put them up that help tell people about the issue or websites or make memes or those kinds of things. And there's a place for that mode to work, absolutely. But maybe the most engaging kind of work, from my perspective, is what David Maggs calls mode three, and that's the work of re-authoring the world. That work really digs down into the, what are the deeply held beliefs or values that we have or identities that we cling to, that are part of this unsustainable system that is requiring a forest to be cut down? How can I make work that's about that? What kind of story, because I'm a playwright and I work with story issues, I think in story. If I was a musician, I might think of it differently. Or if I was a dancer, I might think of different terms than story. But still, what is that deep root? And we know that art can speak to us deeply. Speaks on an emotional level, and that is a level in which change can occur.. And we see this in our kind of crazy fraught society right now, in the sort of battle of ideas. Like very few conservatives become liberals, just based on the ideas. Change lives somewhere else. And so how do we, as artists, use the power that we have, in order to engage in a different level where change can happen.
Steve Tornes 17:21
I feel that society often tries to keep separate art and science, like one is for a cause or advancement, while the other one is like for aesthetics. But you do something really interesting, which is trying to connect people in those two spheres together. And you've touched upon this already, but why do scientists need artists? Why do scientific facts in and of themselves not move people enough? Are they too frightening? Are they not frightening enough? I will say when I read a scientific paper, I can get really frightened by it. And can you describe how these two groups can support each other?
Kendra Fanconi 17:57
I'm the daughter of a scientist and an activist. So, the world of fact, was quite occupied, where I grew up, and there was a lot of room for imagination. But I'm finding now, that coming back to work that integrates those things is so deeply satisfying. We know from the history of climate communications, that we have 40 years of failure in climate communications based on this idea of like the information deficit model. If only people knew the science, then they would change their ways. But what we have is 40 years of failure, people haven't changed their ways. And we're now further into the climate crisis, so that fear is so much a part of it. We know things are changing. We know last spring, that temperature reached 70 degrees Fahrenheit at both of our polls at the same time, and there was record melt, and that that melt could lead to sea level rise of 160 feet. And we live in a coastal community, like, we know what that means. So, it's not getting through. Why? Well, I've worked a lot with a somatic therapist. And one of the things that I've learned from her is that the mind works seven times more quickly than the heart. So, your mind is kind of like up there rabbiting along and chewing up all of this information. But it doesn't have the chance to integrate the emotional body that art is so good at awakening and working with. It's almost like the heart is kind of trundling along behind like a little tortoise going “what’s happening” and can't catch up. So, the change is incomplete. And what does happen is we get anxious, we get climate anxiety, or maybe we get climate despair. And actually, one of the things that we talked about at Greenhouse, we worked with a grief doula, who really taught me that despair is different than grief. Climate grief is us coming together with our shared concerns and really expressing that reality together and out of that sense of community, being able to respond. But climate despair, experienced alone, climate anxiety experienced alone, is very unlikely to move someone to action. People can almost become paralyzed by that anxiety and grief. So, I see that work of the heart and that work that artists can do is the thing which brings us together in community, activates our feeling system, and in there is the potential to mobilise and make change. And that change almost entirely comes from working with others in the kind of collective movements that are successful in shifting things at the climate level. We know from the last IPCC report that we have all of the solutions we need, we don't need any more solutions. What we need is the political will to enact the solutions that we have. So, that political will is all about citizen will, is all about community will, is all about using our voice. That's the missing piece. It's not like we don't know how to fix the problem, we know. But even knowing that we know is part of the solution. So yeah, think of it that way.
Alex Masse 21:21
My next question was actually about climate grief. So, you've beaten me there. There are just so many emotions that can be embodied in the climate crisis. There is anxiety, there is despair. There is in some people a degree of numbness, but grief does kind of feel like, I guess because it's a more unified experience. It can be helpful in processing things because I feel a lot of grief can be that kind of processing. And I do remember at Greenhouse that was a one of the really poignant kind of workshops that we did. So, I guess another question is how do you handle these climate-based emotions, especially when you can do them through so many lens of identity, like your familial roles, your role as an artist, as a settler on unceded land, as an immigrant, or even just as a member of the Anthropocene.
Kendra Fanconi 22:07
Part of what keeps me going personally, is realising that the difference between 1.5 degrees warming, in 2 degrees, or 2 degrees and 4 degrees, the differences are unimaginable amounts of human suffering. So, any work that I do is good work, is necessary work, is work that is preventing suffering. I think that I find it particularly liberating to work with other artists in this sort of desire to have exponential growth in the artists working on this problem, because I feel like people want to do something, they just don't know what, they don't know what and how. And when they find out the what and how of what needs to be done and how they can participate in it, there's just a release of a tremendous amount of energy of people ready to spring into action and to bring their own special superpowers to the work. It feels so much better to be in action. In fact, in Canada, if you go to your doctor complaining of climate anxiety or climate grief, they will prescribe to you, climate action. It truly is the thing that makes you feel better. And it makes me feel better to be activating myself as an artist. And as someone who runs a company, into this work. Because I could be doing it on the side. I could be canvassing for Greenpeace or something like that. But if I can use my own work, what I do best in the world, towards those ends, that feels really great. So, I just know that I wake up and do it every day. And it doesn't mean that when I don't read the articles, I don't experience gut wrenching amounts of climate grief, I do. I'm just like you, I open those articles in The Guardian, or in the New York Times, I read them and I can only get halfway through and I get really overwhelmed. Even though this is work that I'm doing all day long, every day. It's just really hard to be a citizen of the Anthropocene. And to stop and feel that and then ask my kids what they want for dinner and to go on as a mother or to see, I noticed last year that the Salal, which is a native shrub and berry producing plant, it's starting to die off. It really doesn't like the kind of hot summers that we're having now. It's like losing a friend to see the Salal suffering and dying, to see the Cedar suffering. We're living in an extinction event. And we just have to be brave and to keep going. And to know that what we're doing does make a difference.
Alex Masse 24:50
So, I guess it's a matter of aligning all those lenses and emotions and finding a way that you can be part of things because action helps even when like everything is crushing, because it is very crushing, we are living through a mass extinction event. It feels like every day, there's a new record, new disaster, I'm pretty sure. Like even here in BC, we've had fires, we've had floods, we've had all kinds of things. And like Steve said, we're just told to treat it as normal now, but it can be really crushing, though. Action helps. It doesn't alleviate it all the time. But at least it gives you a vessel for that. And I think it is really important. Being able to do that is so important.
Kendra Fanconi 25:33
I think of, you know, our company's teeny tiny, small. It's like me, my best friend Colin, he works part time, and our buddy Liam right now works part time. We're a small organisation. But this small organisation managed to make the Artists Brigade happen. So now 100 artists have had, I don't think we introduced everyone to the idea of climate and art coming together, but you know, hopefully we fed 100 artists. So that's like, you know, one or maybe if you add together Liam and Colin, there's two people's work to do that. The work that we are spearheading with eco-restoration, which I can talk about, it's something that we can give that will seed all these other people and if we, each of us can be in our life influencing those circles that we are a part of like that's where the solution really lies. It's like fully activating our own networks to make change. So, I am emboldened by that. And that's why I think I like that idea of the climate acknowledgement because each of those lists of all events that's happening all over the country, that we're in a different relationship with COVID than we used to be, hopefully in an ongoing way, all these arts events happening continue to remind our audiences, yes, this is this moment, yes, we must take action, go in this direction.
Alex Masse 26:54
It does kind of feel like things like the artists prograde, almost like plant seeds and start this new ecosystem. Because I'm keeping up with the newsletters, seeing all the things that have come out of it. I remember a while back, I designed a poster for a protest that another alumnus of the Artists Brigade of Greenhouse was doing and just the ways that we've stayed connected and just continue to do things. I remember that was one of my takeaways from Greenhouse like, this feels different, because we're going to keep doing things. We're having the field trips, we're staying in touch, there's a spreadsheet with all the contact info, there's a newsletter that goes out regularly. This wasn't just a bunch of people coming together and saying, “oh, this is not great.” This is a bunch of people who were, like you said, emboldened to do climate action. And I think that was really, really great.
Kendra Fanconi 27:36
Yeah, it is heartening. It is. I remember a teacher that I had when I was a young actor, who said, I can't remember the context. But, “Kendra, the only thing you have to give the earth is your body when you die,” like as nutrients, the nutrients in you. And I thought, “oh, gosh, that doesn't seem like very much to give the earth.” And because our company has always been a site-specific theatre company, we haven't worked in theatres, we've mostly worked in wild places. And we've often thought about how can our work give back to places? How can we actually, through our work, not, like there's an old model of theatre production, where you make a set, you use it for your show, and then you hire a five-ton truck who comes, picks the unit, takes it to the dump. And we wanted to be far away from that model. We knew when we set up the company that we wanted to be a zero-impact company. But I think what I've learned is that our work can actually be part of giving back to the earth. So, for example, a project that we're working on is called 1000 Year Theatre, where we have two locations where we're doing it and we're planting a set from the native species of our forests, who basically have a maturation cycle of 1000 years. So, we'll plant a set, then in 1000 years’ time, we'll be ready to do this particular seminal work. But we'll make small pieces each year for each of those 1000 years. But the first year that you come, you might be seeing this teeny, tiny little cedar sprigs or other native species in their kind of tiniest form. And, we like the idea of the kind of hope and stewardship that it takes to think in time frames of 1000 years, to be able to think, “Oh, someone who lives where my apartment is, in 300 years’ time, might come see a show in this same place.” And what does it mean to believe in the future like that? How would I be living now, if I really, truly believed in 300 years, in 600 years, in 1000 years, that we would still be gathering here. Though, it also works with the youth climate movement, so that we have stewards and theatre makers of the future that are involved, that we can hand the work off to and know how to then hand off the work again. So, how do we work in fellowship across generations? And how do we work with the kind of people who are working in forestry, who know what are the most resilient seeds that we can plant now, that will get these species through the kinds of climate events that are predicted in the future. So, it's a kind of combination. We want to create an old growth forest together, not just in the City of Vancouver, but also on a clear cut of forest called Clack Creek Forest that I was part of trying to save, but which was logged. It's been replanted in the sort of most just kind of plantation way, like single crop. But we have a plan to enrich that forest with other species so that it can actually be a functioning ecosystem. The artwork will accompany and be part of creating and restoring this clear cut and also an abandoned place in City of Vancouver. So, that's kind of the work of eco-restoration. And it's another idea that I think is really fun and right for our times, and if we can open it up so that other artists can dream themselves into other kinds of work that are eco-restorative. I'll be super happy.
Alex Masse 31:21
Yeah, that is beautiful, especially because so much of climate work that does look towards the future is so pessimistic. A lot of visions of the future in climate activism and climate art are just various dystopias, everyone's either living underground or living in domes because the air is just too polluted or like we're going to look like Venus in the future. It's nice to hear about these projects that look to a future where we still have trees where we tend to nature, like our descendants have trees.
Kendra Fanconi 31:53
There were studies done about what kinds of climate art actually create impact in their audiences. And they really found that stuff that featured solutions and hopeful frameworks were more effective, and dystopian or apocalyptic scenarios are not effective in creating behavioural change. I've written those plays too. It doesn't mean that moments of that can't be part of bigger pieces and bigger works. There are no hard rules with what does and doesn't work with art. I think it's useful for us as artists to know that if what we're intending to do is create behaviour change, that we probably want to put our focus on finding our own way forward, rather than crashing and burning our species.
Alex Masse 32:47
I guess it is important to have an idea of what the future can be, so you can approach it. Would now be a good time to ask about the future because that is a fun little segway? We've talked about the distant future. But with all this work, and innovation and invention going on, is there anything like that's on the horizon, be that at Greenhouse, at The Only Animal or if there's like something else outside of that, what's up next for Kendra and everything that she's doing?
Kendra Fanconi 33:15
Yeah, we're doing some strategic planning right now to try to figure that out. We have so many things that we want to do. We've had a project we've been working on for a while called Museum of Rain that looks at one woman's relationship with climate through a love story that almost imagines that she's had this stormy relationship with the rain itself. So that project is ongoing. And I'll be spending some time writing that project coming up soon. We're also looking with the Artists Brigade at how we can create partnerships between the other people telling the climate story and artists, relationships, individual relationships, to take different questions and different projects forward. So, we're hoping that our Artists Brigade will be able to engage in more of that next year. We believe really strongly in paying our artists for all of the work that they do, whether it be educational or coming on field trips, or in those kinds of partnerships. So, we're continually fundraising to make those kinds of things happen. I also have a small dream project that I don't know how to fund at all right now. It's called Bird in the Hand, and it looks at what are the things that we want? What do we really deeply, deeply want? And then individual artists, and boy, I would love to do this with the whole 100 artists cohort, would send you a little piece in an envelope to your house, that's about your own desire, and that you could perform this play on the stage of your hand, with the idea that maybe things that we want, like, a new dress for spring or real estate in Vancouver actually have some deeper wants and desires underneath them, like home, like belonging, like celebration. Things that aren't commodified, things that we can actually get from the world in a different way. But I would love to have this many, of like 100 desires that you could get sent to you. And if you uncover by the end of your little play a different desire, then you can send away for that one. So, it's a little pipe dream. I'll just keep ticking away at in the margins of my notebook.
Alex Masse 35:32
I mean, you never know you've pulled off some pretty cool stuff already.
Kendra Fanconi 35:35
By now once I start talking about it, it's almost certain to start happening. So yeah. Might have seeded something just right here today.
Alex Masse 35:44
That's great.
Steve Tornes 35:44
So, one of the tricky things about being an interviewer is, we can only ask about stuff we know. So now that we've already asked you about the known knowns and the known unknowns, now's the time for the unknown unknowns. Is there anything you'd like to add that we just did not ask you about?
Kendra Fanconi 36:02
I think the thing that I really think about, being at the centre of a carbon free future or a fossil free future, is connection. Is the power of connection with each other, with the natural world, the love story of falling in love with our species, with other species, with nature. And I hope whoever's listening to this today, that you have an opportunity for a love story. We often talk about, at the heart of what our company is trying to do, is just be a matchmaker. We just want people to fall in love. We think all good things can come out of that. So, I hope you all have a little love story today.
Steve Tornes 36:46
In which case, there's so much appreciation on our end, to be able to talk with you today, to ask you questions, but at the same time to receive such thoughtful, beautiful, and also hopeful answers. It is quite rare, at least for me, to have a conversation like this where I leave feeling more hopeful about work that I can do, slash that the community can do for mitigating and overcoming the obstacles of climate change. So, thank you.
Kendra Fanconi 37:17
Thank you. It's such a pleasure to talk to you both today.
Debbie C 37:21
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Kendra Fanconi. Head to the show notes to check out the resources mentioned in the show. We release episodes every Tuesday, so subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcasting app of choice to make sure you never miss an episode. Thanks again for listening! Tune in next week for the third episode of The Climate Imaginary with guest Charles Henry!