Climify – Details, episodes & analysis

This is a special three-part series for season four that you suggested to our listeners! We’ve entitled it “Changing the System - Back to School.” All of our guests and organizations in this special series want to impact climate in the classroom or through the school itself (think renewable energy!) We hope you enjoy this bonus series as it came from you – our listeners!

In this first episode of the series, Eric talks with representatives from College to Climate, an organization founded by students and recent graduates that aims to empower young people to pursue careers in climate tech.

Co-founders Jessica Harrington and Larson Burack and designer Kevin Lu discuss their roles in the organization, its mission, and the impact of their inspiring work. They detail the importance of forming a climate community, the value of mentorship in climate fields, and the growing opportunities in climate tech. In addition, they share their favorite success stories from College to Climate and future plans for expanding their reach to create more climate-related job opportunities for the next generation of young leaders.

In this episode of Cimiify, Eric welcomes Thais Mantovani, co-founder of Eco-Universidade, to discuss her journey from a career in marketing to becoming a regenerative strategist and educator. The episode delves into the impact of globalization on local cultures, emphasizing the need for localized solutions and education to foster systemic change. Mantovani shares insights from her holistic science studies at Schumacher College, her work with indigenous communities, and the importance of embracing diverse worldviews and education for sustainable transformation.

After the interview, design researcher Jacqui Himmel joins Eric to unpack the episode providing the most important calls to action from the discussion that you can implement today!

Series 1: Lifestyle as Systems Change

The guests in our lifestyle series are all “walking the walk.” They have integrated climate consciousness into their everyday lives and ways of being. For these experts, climate action is not a discrete choice, but an intrinsic part of their lives. From them, we can learn how to transform our own practices and mindsets to be mores sustainable and future-focused.

In this episode, Haleemah Sadiah shares with Eric her journey as a climate activist and designer. She discusses how she uses systems thinking in her life and work, her participatory design work with communities in India and the US, and how creating spaces that bring people together can plant seeds for larger systemic changes.

Series 1: Lifestyle as Systems Change

The guests in our lifestyle series are all “walking the walk.” They have integrated climate consciousness into their everyday lives and ways of being. For these experts, climate action is not a discrete choice, but an intrinsic part of their lives. From them, we can learn how to transform our own practices and mindsets to be mores sustainable and future-focused.

In this episode, Kobi Naseck shares with Eric his journey as a climate activist and community organizer and how all of us can find a place in the climate justice movement. He discusses his work with VISIÓN (where his goal is to end neighborhood oil drilling), why abolition and climate justice are intertwined, the current state of climate justice in California, why our elected officials won’t save us, and how to measure success in the climate justice movement.

In this episode, Emma Askew shares with Eric why and how, at 22, she founded Earth Minutes, an organization that specializes in environmental communication and on a mission to drive the future of environmental thinking and learning. Emma details her definition of a system (and how to change it), sustainable design tips, and why putting your hands in the dirt regularly can help your mental health. She argues (with science to back it up) that purposeful time in Mother Nature will not only help your health, but give you more clarity about why better coexisting with her will help us all thrive now and into the future.

We're excited to let you know that season four of Climify is recorded and ready for launch on June 13th, 2024. This season, we're doing things a bit differently, which we feel will make the program more inspiring and actionable. The theme for this season is “Change the System.”

Climate change can be quite an overwhelming issue. There are so many things to be worried about and they seem to be happening all at once. This can make us feel anxious or depressed, sad, or apathetic. How can one person make a real difference? The truth of the matter is that little things can help, and our guests this season prove that. Small steps can indeed create a ripple effect leading to bigger impacts. Our guests are involved in various action levels from daily life to work, and even those who influence national policies. We will learn what has worked for them and how you can implement climate solutions in your home, design studio, or curriculum to contribute to climate action.

Besides our amazing guests in each episode, I'll be joined by new voices from the Climify team – Bhavna, Jacqui, Cam, and Abigail to make sense of the discussion and provide tools to help with the climate calls to action from the conversation with the guest.

I'm truly looking forward to this season and hearing from you. How are you changing or disrupting the system for climate action? We're all in this together. So see you on June 13th, 2024. Tune into Climify on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

- Eric Benson

Climify Producer Cam Burkins rejoins Dr. Melinda Adams to go deeper into her life and work. In particular, this episode explores solastalgia (or climate anxiety) and soliphilia (cures or mitigation methods against that anxiety). Melinda shares Traditional Ecological Practices that provide hope for our collective future, which will surely be Matriarchal!

How do we learn from the land and its lineage?

In this special bridge episode, Dr. Melinda Adams—Indigenous scholar, ecologist, and cultural fire practitioner—explores how place-specific, Indigenous-led practices are the key to stewarding and restoring our shared lands. Dismantling the rhetoric of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), Adams teaches a more actionable approach to controlled burning—Humble Fire—that reframes fire as a “more-than-human relative,” from which we must actively listen and learn. This “storytelling on the land” calls us to defer to Indigenous ways of being in our interventions and return to the land, assessing how our ancestor responds and applying what we learn to ensure our collective future.

Our First Crossover Episode with TILClimate from MIT!

As we are on hiatus this winter planning yet another amazing season of Climify, we thought it would be nice to continue to provide climate education and action through the work of some of our friends. So today, we invited a kindred spirit podcast produced at MIT - TILClimate to our platform to share what they know about materials. The host of TILClimate is Laur Hesse Fisher, the Program Director at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative.

In this crossover episode with TILClimate, Laur, and Elsa Olivetti dive into materials and their impacts on our planet. As designers, we choose materials to build the things we create. So, knowing more about how to select, reduce, and reuse materials in addition to the knowledge to find vendors that manufacture responsibly can help us be better climate designers.

What is Life-Centered Design? What is Life-Centered Systems Thinking? Are they different? Are they better than Human Centered Design? And most importantly, how do we design with all life in mind?

Michelle Fehler, Charlene Sequeira, and Jeroen Spoelstra join Eric in this final “back-to-school” episode which we hope, inspires you to learn more about the merits of life-centered design. The guests today all argue that life-centered design and systems thinking are a needed transition away from human-centered design (HCD) and design thinking. We are nature, not separate from it. So we need to consider more than just us in our design work as clearly Mother Earth isn’t happy with our past and current antics with fossil fuels and pollution. If we understand how we fit in with and the important interconnectedness of nature, then possibly we can create in a better balance respecting all around us.