sherry we can look at the science we can see that we've put out more parts per million of c o two than ever before recently we had that of four hundred and we just hit a new new record of four hundred forty parts per million and and sure there's all that science and there's the fact that you know we've took in all of the hydrocarbons in the fossil fuels from which are supposed to be which are the dinosaurs and they're supposed to be underground we brought them above ground and we've now put them in the atmosphere and now we spent starting to see the impacts from that but when we look at who did that and when we look at you know how did who benefited from that that's why when i see climate change  is as an extension of colonization because none of this would have happened if everybody stayed in their own countries and then steal from each other and their resources and when you look at who did it was the colonizers primarily white countries  look at the historic historically who put out the most c o two it's america it's england it's germany it's france and the thing that they all have in common is that they're all majority white countries they all have been colonize and and when you look at who's most impacted it's the opposite it was the people who were colonized it's the people who had those natural resources stolen out of their land and so when we look at climate solutions if we don't realize that this is an extension of colonisation unless we're changing our behavior toward people toward those countries or being most impacted nothing will change will be an extension even if we you know get a bunch of we go all renewable we put in our carbon tax and we all have electric cars well all of those use precious metals and most of those precious metals are given in the countries that were formerly colonized and that includes exploitive mining and it include you know this if we go about climate solutions with that same capitalistic colonial framework we're going to end up with another problem maybe it won't be climate change they will poke another hole no zone regardless the way that we're going about this and it's only been humans have only been on this planet for a blip that time and even shorter amount time have we been burning fossil fuels but yet in that short amount of i think i was caught in the money being life not knowing how to break free from it and so the really sad example of i had finished with one hundred eighty credits and the only way that i was able to somehow break from that was from and finding my purpose was being exposed to a community new communities and new friends and so  companies eight years and i you know my first job straight out of college was i google and i remember finding myself at twenty four twenty five feeling really unhappy in what i was doing and i had to stop and think about oh i have this job that supposedly is the but you know it's the best split best company in the world to work for and i still felt like i wasn't doing something meaningful i really felt unhappy being there  and so i had to stop and ask myself what is it that makes me happy is in having this job but i felt i felt like i wasn't working to a vision of my own i was or i was a puppet in somebody else's vision and even though google  and i felt like it was my first like it was my duty to to acquire that lifestyle because so many people back home couldn't have it but you know when when i when i got bored and some of those things were taken away from me once again was a moment of questioning what is it that makes me once again i found myself at a tech job again feeling unhappy and knowing in my heart that this is not what i was meant to do so this february when when they asked me to leave and i got laid off a part of me for a bud one minute was ashamed and embarrassed and for it and then another huge part of me was like so happy and relieved and was saying that the universe is sending you towards something meaningful and so i really for the determined to you know take time off this summer and find something meaningful to do and i was like what can i do i know it's going to be something with the n y m and you know i can feel it's getting hotter i don't like it you know reading was things back home and i kept showing up and i kept asking people at tables what can i do i have all this free time when can i do and fortunately i got to i read multiple people from rising tide seattle and started you know participating with them at first i really thought that just showing up and marches was important and just my body just just the presence of one more body was important but over the last few months and being in conversations with these women and you know hearing from other folks and starting to get educated about racism and all of these other things that come into climate change i said like it's not enough just to bring my body it's i also need to speak up and i've been trying been wondering where and how and maybe maybe it is writing a blog but that's why i'm here and you know i feel like i feel like the from my favorite system marker it really she says those benefiting from the present system has no interest in your need new ideas in fact your thinking is a threat to them the moment you start thinking you want to change something and so my question is are you there when did you start thinking and  grade i was in a co op type school it was like a home school program and just experience a lot of free thinking and meal wasn't always i wasn't talking about the you know barriers that i have transition in a private school and there was a christian school and it was in fifth grade i found out was a liberal because just the way that people spoke about things it was they started can find things and even like they said i had to wear a skirt on thursdays and i was like no i would spend say you can't tell me what to do is my freedom ok and like a fifth grader i also got kicked out of my classroom because  my teacher was telling us how it was god's plan to drill in the arctic for oil and i called her a liar and a polar bear killer know it had just started college and we got involved in like the student debt crisis and we started fighting for you know the right to go to school for free and a variety of things but it also i think getting involved with activism during occupy also gave me very much of an intersection lin's and able to see how these different movements are all connected because a lot of times some people want to be activists for one  good it's the same systems of oppression that they were all fighting spirit yeah i i was born in the eighty's in england during the sacto government and for children who for many of which do you know that may have been the only nutrition they got all day they stopped getting it and i remember just being a child and thinking this needs to stop and you know i was brought up in a very political household my myself my family and my though the history of my family is very political and so you know i grew up watching my father watch newsnight on b b c two and being extremely bored by it and then when i was like sometime around fourteen fifteen found out that i wasn't bored anymore and i was listening and yelling at the t and and and when i you know and i went to i went to a lot of protests and when i became a college student when i went to cardiff university i  yes this is my chance this is my time i can get involved and i can be really active and you know and i can say stuff and and i did and i got involved with people and planet society which there were people there from india there were people there from europe and we were talking about how the netherlands itself is a country that is already below sea level and here we are in the hague with the superpower has walked out of these talks and these are the talks that are supposedly going to create some kind of system that's going to get us out of this hole that we've dug ourselves in and i realized when they walked out on the t collapsed we could wait for politicians to fix this they're not going to they're not going to they have had decades upon decades it was one thousand nine hundred eighty eight when nasa actually said that climate change is real nine hundred eighty eight havoc and pain and destruction to so many people around the world and so that kind of thinking has been in me for a long time it just took a process i remember being a child and writing articles about the tigers because they were going extinct and they still are going stings and not schools or got published or anything just for myself you know because we have  to if we are not educating ourselves then it's very difficult to be a critical thinker and to watch the news and actually critically watch it as opposed to just oh fox news wants to tell us everything's ok in my community do and in many ways that's one of the reasons why i wanted to do this event is because i wanted to talk to my own community i wanted to talk to indian people i want to talk to hindus people because particularly i'm in seattle as you know you know africa and you know there are great many people all in my community who have you know positions of really great privilege and wealth and they are educated they have resources  you know we all people of all of hard work and dedication we have come a long way and there's no reason why we should not have a voice here there's no reason why why we should not be able to speak out particularly when just a month ago two thousand three hundred people died in india because of a one hundred twenty two degrees heat wave and it's not people who are wealthy who are dying it's people who have nowhere to hide from the heat because there's no where to go this air condition when your paul there's no way that you can go to hide from that and it was a many generations ago one of my own family was in that situation and so i have to speak to my own demographic because they know they just do not feel as if they've been spoken to and they feel as if there's no place for them and so in thinking thinking thinking coming along this route i am now in this place talking you and i hope that i'm also speaking to my own demographic because whatever happened to humanity whatever is currently happening to him it is happening to all of us this is what alice walker had wrote in the overcoming speechlessness so we're talking about you know this disconnection that we don't see this interwar when this between us and the downstream effects of what happens when things are thrown away or things are consumes what are your thoughts on how do how do we connect us again to connect up different demographic well or to connect it will just a i don't know feel interconnected and community and then you know growing up in bombay is this huge city of contradictions where there's billionaires and poor people living you know on the same street and still that's where i grew  your reality and it's hard for your hard to bleed every time you see someone suffering at some point you can't afford to burst into tears every time you see someone but for me it  had moments of despair and the moments of courage that i had to look into myself and often the answer was through just of my practice of yoga the answer was that you know it's only in it's only and seeing that we're all the same and very connected that i could feel happy and i could i could find meaning in my life and so that's what it was it was many many years for many bubbles to burst many bu privilege many bubbles of you know maybe what my parents put over me to protect me from heard that i had to burst on my own and to come to realize that that is that out of this conditioning of being selfish and out of the conditioning to just look for my own self preservation i was causing her to other people and that that those but but those bubbles needed to burst and that conditioning needed to be broken and that selfishness needed to be dropped so that that was for me with fortune you know fortunate or unfortunate see of questionings and heard that those lessons came to there and and so that in a way we're closer together we're further apart you know we can we bring a bunch of people together and like a lot of people to pressure from my generation younger like your high five people th you know next to each other and so in that way i think we've disconnected and it's crazy like i think this is part of seattle's culture the seattle freeze of coldness but like  i love talking to people on the bus and i love talking to folks and and it's crazy because it's very they're a transplant or they're you know not like all the way there or sometimes they have like nothing identity being that my mom's black and my dad's ethiopian and you know as both like you know a second generation immigrant as a black person in america those realities are a lot different and i think sometimes like i feel like you know the government if you appear right now it's really pressers and they're not letting you speak out and so i feel like i have to speak out about all of this injustice because i have that privilege as an american beza black person  america some of the privileges taken away so it's it's interesting but i think definitely having family abroad helps me look at these things from a global perspective because in america i mean even here we're in the middle of a drought but when you turn on your fosset water comes out so you know we're not noticing that drought but the people who are most impacted do and by keeping like a global perspective and remembering their family field they're having to deal with these issues in a lot more real basis than i am i think it makes me feel like i have to be accountable to them even though some of my i haven't met before i still feel like i have to remain accountable and and you know take work on taking down these systems and stopping things like pipelines and it's because all of this is going to affect my family back there the most and one thing absolutely i think that you are not different from me we come from the same we come from the same ground our bodies are made of the same thing and one thing that i try to remember and i think that it's important to talk to each other about is the fact that you and i or anyone else feeling disconnected from each other is a symptom of the system it is a symptom of a colonial system a racist system a patriarchal system a capsule a system a system that wants you to think about your shopping and doesn't want you to think about your community you know we used to grow food locally we used to grow food locally and then eat it locally eat a community come together as a society people used to come together around the campfire all the hoff and actually tell stories actually talk to each other look at each other play music dance these are all ways in which we can still do that but instead no no you have to go to a club you have to pay to get in you have to wear the right clothes you have to listen to the music only other people want one you to listen to because that's what's cool that's what's in that's what's fashionable that's the system and i think that if we are going to be connected to each other if we're going to reconnect we have to start stepping back from those things and we have to start saying what is what is happening in my community right now who is hungry right now who is suffering right now who doesn't have a home right now we have a massive homeless community here in seattle and that is not something that is separate from the rest of the world there is a massive homelessness crisis in in of this country and that is not separate from other countries that is simply a knock on effect it is a domino effect we have been displaced see and making people homeless in other countries for decades and centuries and in this country also we started this by talking about stolen land where do you think they went what do you think happened to them when we burned when not we but when the people who colonized this area  white friends being evicted from their homes by the sheriff's department because chase bank wants their home it's not a separate occurrence they simply first they came for the black people and i did not listen because i was no action council meeting and you know there are sponsor i adore them and the facility you know activists and a lot of the movements you know the word token and kept getting broader can you explain what tokenism is and how do we address it i would start by saying  tokenism is really like now actually inviting like the entire community but inviting one person to speak for their entire community and that happens a lot in their environmental community  place a good part and that being good token and you know first i didn't realize it for a long time i remember i just thought you know everyone loved me and that's why i was always like in the front and they'd always put me in their pictures because they didn't actually go out and do the work and try that you know work in those communities and do the outreach that's needed instead they try to you know put a person of color face in the front  d don't have people of color you know it might not be the case and continue to be their kids who are your advertising too bad the same time i think that the outreach work needs to be done instead of just to be fair to everyone it's also a matter of capacity you know when when you have you know people who are working so hard so long with with very few resources and they're trying to do the work by five and so one of the things that i feel called to do as someone who's in this movement and someone who is a person of color someone who is in this particular demographic is to do that i know that in many ways you know yeah i have been a token and at the same time for me personally it has been intentional because i want to speak to my community i want to be able to say my brothers and sisters and everyone in between leave join this movement we need you ethiopian group wouldn't it be brilliant if we had a taiwanese group of vietnamese group all all you know all of the other denominations within those groups because there are many many different groups and tribes and faces backgrounds within those that need to be spoken to because they all have concerns and they are all concerned about this in different ways and so so the tokenism is there but at the same time we all have to come together and think about creative ways new ways so the we can do that outreach and also not be pointing fingers and not blaming people to the extent that they feel as if nothing they do is working because that's not fair why do we fight it's oh oil with plastic kayak and why do we drive cars to rally i mean why would you want to drive you me that the excuse which i heard coming from like everyone from the heritage foundation the fox news really we're trying to change the system here and there's a reason because at this current system it's a fossil fuel based economy and that they've tracked this in the system where you cannot live a day without fossil fuel unless you know you go out of your way to go out in the woods and but that's but then you aren't using the system then you're just hiding in the wood you take you know yes we'll have to use like a master's tool to take down their house but at the same time it's important we realize like if if you using if you know driving there instead of taking a three hour bus it's going to allow you to do more work and to get closer to the goal of where you won't have to use it closer to the goal of a fossil fuel free future then it's worth it because that is a bigger impact than hiding in the woods and it's also important  tools but at the same time you know they continued to fight it regardless of you know whether or not their clothes was made you know slave free and you know absolutely thank you thank you and one thing that has to be sad and you know  that is their way of making us fight amongst ourselves that is their way of distracting us from the actual issue which is a white european company called shell wants to go to the plastic distracted ok that is that is that's like the number one mr act and so whenever you hear that i understand and call it out the what you are saying right th propaganda from the fossil fuel company when you say that you are basically then mouthpiece so congratulations for being that mouthpiece but you are not helping anyone you off putting i just feel like i've read the go you know just see is corporations have spent so much money depriving science from developing that it's going to allow renewable clean energy to come into the market so pigeons and you know new designs solar panels that could have myriad you know energies here for us to have our being you know stuff like repressed and so that's all part of this huge system that is you know stopping us from stepping off the fossil fuel train and that it's it's terrifying it's massive but each of us becoming aware of it i think is  talking about is a step and doing a little bit thing is it makes the difference to yeah and getting out in the streets makes a difference let me let me let me let me give you one example of how the system totally just fuel system so right now we have this financial collapse which was caused by the banks people got displaced they got taken they got thrown out of their homes now they have now they can't afford anything in their credit shock which means they have to move afford it and even though you don't want to use that fuel then you know now you're roped into not only paying massively high rent but your roped into buying a car and making cop a mess paying into the fossil fuel industry and it's never ending and it goes on and on and on so we have to speak up about climate justice we have to speak up about transit justice this is not an accident that they caught public transport it's not an accident while giving corporations  voice you know i'm forgetting her name but the quote that says you know being being a black person in a black woman in america hoop in the wrong place and all of that and but then on top of that like the way they make the students there they kept asking me to rap for them and i didn't understand why either  and i did poetry and i was really good at poetry and poetry pretty much rap and so i you know i did rap because i got a lot of tension for in seventh grade that's pretty important and so i did all these things falling into these traps and not realizing it and then they i begin this it but it wasn't like years later when i look back and i for example i got suspended for having a rap battle but the white boy who violate me to do it didn't get suspended and they said oh well they didn't know about that before you came and then later on after they realized that i wasn't going to be there basketball star they expelled me for bringing supplements school like and i didn't know about the prison to school pipeline and i didn't realize that they expel black students at a higher rate and that they criminalize us from the day that we walk in starting from kindergarten and that because i was out of that system and i had been sheltered from that but it wasn't an intel and it wasn't even while was happening you realize that this was part of a larger system but you know years later now that now i see that it's inspired me more to fight it because i know myself i got trapped into it you know despite having you know coming from a good family and having support and it still happens so i can only imagine all the other kids who are fortunate to i grew up in an indian hindu family and within the philosophy that i was taught there is this law it's called the north god i'm a you might know it's karma i'm the law of karma is that for every action there is a reaction and so i was brought up with this understanding that everything that you do have an effect not just now but in the future and so what you do must be something good because if you hurt people then the heart will not only increase but it will come back to you and so it was this sense of being more conscious of the people around me like i remember being in college and making sure the my my my in my music wasn't too loud because i didn't want to disturb the people in the rooms around me which is of course crazy because everyone knows college  time and place really loud music but i don't know i mean it was it was something that was very instilled in me from a very young age and so you know to be an activist now it's not a huge step it's not a huge leap you know to know that everything that i do has a direct impact on this earth for example i was raised vegetarian and you know being hindu i grew up hearing many different spiritual leaders talk about vegetarianism and about nonviolence and about not exploiting other beings and one spiritual teacher treadle who i consider to be one of my girls  and it had a very deep impact on me because i really thought about the violence of the meat industry and the violence of the food industry and the agricultural industry and how when you look her climate science today we have found that fifty one percent or more of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from the meat and fish industry that's more than cars that's more than plastic kayaks that small then the lights in your house it's the food on your plate that is something so fundamental and so as someone who has been raised by sharon i'm intimately grateful for that but it's also something that i feel like i have to talk about not as a hindu proselytizing because in fact that's not what a hindu dot's but as an activist i feel learning the statistics learning the science understanding how amazingly destructive it is to this planet that we live on i have to speak because god for every action there is a reaction and the food on your plate has a reaction around the world and there are people who do not have food on their plate because of the food on your plate and this is something that we have to really recognize and me personally as someone who has been raised this way i it's something that i have to be constantly conscious of but i feel like in many ways i feel like i'm failing that part of myself because i haven't spoken about it enough because i'm a hindu and i don't want to and it's but as an activist i've come to this realization where is this isn't about my religion this isn't about my faith this is about the facts and the facts are undeniable and so i feel like there are so many ways in which it connects but for me that's one of the ways that so fundamental well so i just want to say that league designers like the extreme version of me league she's like i am the quiet passive asian and she is like the last proud and you know she's like began and know but you know you have to start somewhere and you know if you just say one day you might be gon even where thread like this thing was eight dollars like you know that concept really working with that tension took a while and you know the habit is hard and so i have another croaker i love quotes  we are what we do so iceland's then is not an act but a habit and that's from aristotle and i think you know we have to start somewhere and they think i think the points of what we're trying to say is actually just starting not so much in the median but you guys keep talking about the science and the science is so hard to process it's so hard like when they you know hear about it i just want to crawl into a shell and not have a face the world anymore like wife and you know having that emotional capacity to process science i think that is something that environmentalists need to work on the movement itself because i can barely comprehend you know my rents and my student loans and you know life and the complexity of life and how my civil suit on top of all of that handle the science that's being thrown at me in facebook and twitter and every single media that i see and so i think that's my question is how do you digest the science so for me and because the science is still so new and i'm still the strewing on it and my circle of friends and peers really are people who you know are still living in the bubble that i was in three or four months ago where you know there is a knowledge that oh yeah it is a problem but still haven't made that move of stepping and doing something about it and so recognizing seeing that even you know when the people of the people i live with and the people i worked with just for me it really was to try and be to live up to what i was trying to do and be an example and inspiration i remember when i first started doing yoga and turned spiritual and it was a sudden turn i was twenty a girl who liked to party and drink and then i had a moment of heartbreak and then i was all of a sudden not drinking you know it was a quick transformation and my friends that didn't believe that it was going to last they just thought that it was just a phase but at that i was so impassioned by this change in me and i really started i really wanted everyone to see the world the way i did and i spoke about it so passionately like trying to conv people to do yoga and become spiritual and i quickly learned that that's not the way you do it if you don't and you don't do it by talking about it and you know trying to sports really change perspectives but it really was i curious about why i chose certain things and why i lived a certain way and so the same thing i think if the science is hard to talk about and i honestly when when my roommates ask me about why i'm doing certain things i am not able to always counter their arguments about the economics of things but i know in my heart that the direction in which our world is going is wrong and i know in my heart that we have to change we're coming to a tipping point and to me that is and that is enough reason to change how we're living so when it when the when the conversation becomes too technical i speak from my heart and you know give examples about things that mean to me that might not exist like beaches and you know if the ocean level rises are we are going to lose our beaches because you know beaches take housing and thousands of years to get formed and you know so just talking about things that people can relate to makes it easier for them to see the perspective and i think just being an example is the way i try and do it i came from a and i started realizing that that wasn't going to solve anything when they said they started saying well you know you're comes a point you know if you're going to go to grad school you're through science but what kind of showed me that that was activism and that was the path that i had to go through i was working at and we were working on some ocean acidification research and we were able to see these these tiny shells terra pods which make up the food chain dissolving in the current state of the ocean and i was so shocked that i could see with my own eyes to scanning electron microscope that these animals were dying right now in the future today and i was like well you were the federal government like let's do something i do all the evidence we need is the bottom of the food chain is crumbling the rest of the ocean is going to die like what more do we need and she's like oh no you know they were poor in hopes that someone reads it we're going to put out some policy recommendations and i was like it's not working and that's when i got involved in like fossil fuel divestment and started working more on that angle because i realized like it's important that we know how bad the problem is but science isn't going to solve the problem science is only going to tell us how bad it is and we've already seen with the climate scientists for the most part they've been really disengaged so we can't look to them for our saviors we have to be our own saviors and that's really what activism has given and one thing that i would like to add to that is that you know i think humans have this amazing capacity for hope and we have this beautiful capacity for compassion and we have this and and often when we decide to do something good they marry and for example my family is from india my india's blood and the blood of many african countries the blood of many countries in the middle east in the far east the british empire was created by a capitalist system it was actually the east india company which was a corporation that first came to india and began to sing kids books of control and domination it was a system of  that system of capitalism it was that system of oppression that the basically led to a country and a freezing island off the coast of europe deciding that they had a right to control this massive country of millions of people on the other side of the world and when we look at climate change when we look at the fossil fuel industry when we look  extraction the fact that shell for example is a european country and wants to go up to the arctic the fact that it was shell that went to nigeria and absolutely ravaged the niger delta the fact that it was a white european country shell that went to peru and did what they did to the people there this is something that we around the globe that these different people in these different countries can relate to each other on when i see what's happening in the arctic i see my grandfather i see my people i see the people in nigeria i see the indigenous people here and that connection i something that we all have to see it's something that we all have to recognize and we're not going to recognize until we talk about it until we we make those connections until we say oh you know there was a massive drought in ethiopia w family came from and it was because of that drought that so many people in ethiopia had to leave their country and that drought wasn't by accident it didn't just happen these things are connected to our fuel usage that is happening the majority of which have happened in history in western why colonial countries and so when i look at how we connect with each other and how how and how we look at it beyond science i look at the people i look at the cultures i look at the history and i look at these conversations that we can have as families as friends and look at each other's cultures and see how in history we have resisted we resisted the british empire and we test them now we can do it again