Hope after Climate Catastrophe—Lessons from Hurricane Helene : A Presantation by Casey King

Welcome. It's good to see everyone. Thanks for coming to tonight's presentation, Hope After Climate Catastrophe: Lessons from Hurricane Helen. I'm John Smallley, librarian with the San Francisco Public Library with the humanities department in this building. Uh before we get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about an upcoming program. On behalf of the San Francisco Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramos Shalon, who are the original inhabitants of the San San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramos have never lost, forgotten, or seated their responsibility. As caretakers of this place, as guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramachish community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. Tonight's presentation is part of the library's everybody's climate program series through the month of July, which we hope will inspire you to act for a safer, greener, and more sustainable future. I want to mention one of those programs coming up uh this Sunday at 1 p.m. in this room. We'll be screening a fabulous new documentary called Radical Thread by local filmmaker Jean C. Finny. This is a documentary about a back tothe-ear community called The Ridge in Northern California where uh the inhabitants of this place fight off sort of corporate uh environmental destruction and their community ethos results in them weaving a remarkable 83 foot long tapestry. And this tapestry is woven over many many years with I think over 300 participants. and one of the tableau in the tapestry is uh memorializing this uh episode but the the other tableau are really chronicling the entire history of the community. So that's a remarkable work of art and the cinematography is quite beautiful. Uh after the screening it's a 70minute film there will be a Q&A with the director Jean C. with the assistant director Yuang Guo and also with the uh editor of a museum catalog uh featuring this tapestry um Jason Danielson. So all three of them will be available after the film screening. Hope you can come to that. If you want to know more about the programs here, you can go to the table on your right. There's a brochure listing all the programs. There's also flyers. Uh also there's coffee and cookies, so help yourself to that. Uh above the table there are some QR codes. Before you leave today, please take a moment and capture the QR code and give us your comments or suggestions about tonight's program or about the series. Uh we we're always interested to know what we did right or what we could do better. So that's all I have to say about announcements. Um maybe I'll just say a few words of introduction about tonight's speaker. Casey King is the director of sustainability and also a lecturer in environmental science at the University of North Carolina Asheville. Uh her work addresses um you know science-based environmental management and also approaches to transdisciplinary climate change um transformation. So um please give a warm welcome to Casey. Thank you, John. I'm really thrilled to be part of this uh everybody's climate series and I took the title pretty seriously and and and in putting the talk together to just really make this something that um a beginning of a conversation. So, it's not really a technical talk or a highly academic talk. It's a talk really about the concept of of hope. Um especially after catastrophe. Um one of the things that I wanted to do in coming here was to kind of bring the east coast to you and some information on how we're experiencing climate change. Um we do have fires but not what you have here. um we have a lot more heavy rain events and flooding um and really crazy things happening like living in the mountains and getting wiped out by a hurricane. Um and so I just want to talk a little bit about that, but really um again kind of more informally really want to offer a space for some conversation. I'll I'll I'll I'll um go through the talk and and and bring up some things and then let's have a conversation at the end. Is this concept of being hopeful useful? Um, I know a lot of people kind of sometimes talk about using your anger to be productive. Um, that one doesn't work for me. So, this is my paradigm and I I would like some feedback, some, you know, and see how you feel about this kind of concept and and and and thinking through things um, intellectually, but also through, you know, the mind and the heart um, emotionally um, and really kind of pulling together all of the different ways that I think about the world and experience it. um to kind of think about this. How do you have hope and what is hope? So um this is a little blocky here, but I want to show you this is hurricane Helen that we had in the end of September in 2024. Um in the community I live in, Asheville, North Carolina. This is still a very present phenomenon. Um it will take us decades to recover. Um it is our our city of Asheville sustainability office uh just renamed themselves the office of recovery and resilience because we are in this for decades. Um so and this is you know that hurricane Helen started around Nicaragua um and it hit >> sorry sorry it's hard for me not to walk around um >> oh just turn. >> Is that good? Can you hear me? >> Okay, I'll talk a little. So, it started around um uh Nicaragua and over uh a very very warm ocean. Um it grew and made landfall in Florida, which is usually devastating for the communities there. Not really something mountain communities think about. Um, and we ended up I don't know how well you can tell. It's a little bit granulated, but I'll wait till it starts again. The hurricane comes in, makes it from Florida, still a hurricane into the middle of Georgia, um, up through western North Carolina, Tennessee by the time that it was up around Asheville, North Carolina. I'll show you actually. Um, so we're talking landfall around here and over 550 miles and it kept going. It actually went up into Virginia. It was a tropical storm by the time that it reached Ash asheville, but the winds were really not much slower. We had wind gusts over hundreds of miles an hour or 100 miles an hour. Um, it was 500 miles wide, 50 miles high. Um and this was something you know we live in a town that pe many people from California uh have moved to Asheville, North Carolina because town's running out of water. Um people being you know losing their homes in fire. Um it has and a lot of people from Florida have moved up to Asheville, North Carolina because it is getting a reputation as a climate haven. Um, and so this sort of served as not that everybody didn't know that that really there really is no such thing, but it did serve as a wake-up call that there really is nowhere on the planet that is not being that this, uh, climate change is not being felt and that it's not really becoming the new norm. And so, um, this is a little, you know, to describe to look at these pictures. There's a few things here I want to talk about the pictures, but um one of the things is this is 500 miles wide of damage. So we have communities if you drove Route 40, which goes between Asheville and Nashville, uh didn't open until the following May. So from October, November, December, it was it was just impassible. um getting out the opposite direction, taking 40 towards uh the coast and and to Raleigh. We could get out there a week later, but the entire road was just full of landslides that were recently cleared as well as giant trees just all over the I mean, so it was so wide and it was I, you know, I was in New York City during September 11th and just remember it was very concentrated, but the high level of destruction and a lot of people who kind of live through this, you got that same sort of PTSD from just the level of destruction. And it felt it felt very personal. Um over 250 people or 248 people died. Um 105 in western North Carolina. Everybody knows somebody there. The one of the policemen at UNC Asheville lost 11 family members. Uh they all lived kind of close and there was landslides that came down. Um, and as I said, it's it's been something that um like it would we it brought us closer as a community, but it's something that was catastrophic and and psychologically extremely affecting and brought on a lot of despair. Um, so I just want to and you know, and I don't know how many of you know the concept of loss and damage, but it's a term uh used in a lot of the climate negotiations. um uh as uh what is it that is uh been damaged beyond repair. And so a lot of the um uh developing nations, for lack of a better word, have asked for finance to contribute significantly to the losses that they are facing due to climate change, especially countries who actually really never had a fossil fuel-based system. But um so I'm kind of using that term here, but we had um you know the the biggest it was both the wind and the water. And so, um, I'll show you a little bit, um, in a bit a little bit more about the dynamics of the storm, but we lost 40% of our tree canopy. Um, some areas completely, uh, the Blue Ridge Parkway goes through Asheville, and you couldn't hike it for almost six months. Now that you can hike it, you just sort of cry when you hike because because of the level of tree loss. I mean, it was extreme. Um, we had flooding. This is kind of right near UNCCA campus. Um this was a big plastics and PVC pipe factory. The PVC pipes from this factory went 20 miles down the river and it took like two years to pull all the P PVC pipe out of the river. um that we actually had federal agents come in and do it, but they were and core of army engineers and they were being really destructive to the river banks um and and we have very sensitive salamanders called hellbenders and they were they were just coming in and with this big equipment and and moving stuff. And so actually the uh nonprofit and city government uh community came together and got them out and got federal funding to be able to actually do our own removal of the debris. but they still left some semi-truckss in there and things like that that we're dealing with. Um the amount of debris was kind of incredible. This is on Route 40. Um lots of these landslides that just brought down a lot of material and they were some of the um reasons for many of the deaths that happened there. So I just want to give you a little sense. Oops. And this is just a few more pictures here. Um I don't Is it possible to make my slides available on I don't know if it is but I have there's there's actually a really great website here that um this that we put together kind of looking at all of the the issues that occurred um because we had what we had was a predecessor event. We had a a big heavy rainfall event just which we're getting now pretty regularly due to climate change. So the as the clouds hit the mountains u we've been getting like really short extreme rain events. Well, the hurricane hit up against that. So, we had basically three days of rain and we're in steep mountainous terrain which brought down a lot of the water which caused a lot of this uh devastation. So, this is not what the talk is about. It's about how do you witness this level of destruction when you know what the cause is and you're feeling very much despairing that we don't seem to be doing anything about it. Um, so, um, I don't know how familiar the crowd is with, uh, the writer Rebecca Snit. Um, but I usually, uh, I really like to teach, uh, Rebecca Snit's writing. I feel like during COVID, um, is it hope and darkness? hope hope in the dark um was got me through thinking thinking about kind of the world we live in and and how to think about um not being paralyzed. I mean I feel like that's many many ways what my definition at the basis is is how do you not how how do you not become paralyzed by uh what's happening? But I like her hope and I usually I like her definition of hope and I usually start with students with this um because sometimes I don't want to show them my despair. When you teach 18 through 21 year olds um who are really starting out their life um you you you can't even though some of those photog some of those photographs were by our 18 through 24 year olds um who were who felt compelled to document and witness bear witness to what they saw. Um, but I I I can't do that on a regular basis with the stuff I teach because I teach a lot of kind of really heavy environmental uh um issues. And so I like I like her definition. And she says, "Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes the best and assumes its inevitability, which leads to passivity, as do the pessimism and cynicism that assume the worst. Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss. It means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it. So a start. So I so I I don't know how you feel about that definition, but I want to I want to push it a little bit further to you. So I teach at a a small public liberal arts university. Um which is the perfect place for me. Um because and you'll and even this talk I don't have a specific I I come from a strong science background. Um, but in order to sort of really process what we're going through with climate change, um, I really think the usefulness of looking at all the different areas and how they can contribute, but really actually in a way taking sort of a higher metal level view of how we need to kind of think about climate change. Um, you know, one of the things that brings me hope teaching in a liberal arts school is that I see that people on multiple fronts are working on the climate change issues. So in many cases sciences and engineering have you know this is not just their problem. Um they've done an amazing job. The scientists and engineers have done an amazing job. We understand the system which I'm going to talk about in a second. We understand what's happening. The modeling and the prediction has gotten like I mean it's better than we even imagined it could possibly ever become. Um we're actually kind of surprised at how well some of the modeling works based on the complexity of the systems and the feedbacks that occur. Um but we have been able to understand the concepts of adaptation and mit mitigation which we'll talk about in a second. The social sciences are also having leaps and bounds of how you actually talk to people and try to influence behavior. Um you know again none of these are these are problems that we continued to work on but we have you know people looking at um finance and economic systems looking at beliefs politics um issues of power hierarchies and how they interact. Yes. >> You're kind of on the front lines of this teaching to to college students. >> Do they they're a lot stronger. I mean, it's been a long time for me, but they're they're pretty this is devastating stuff. But how do you what's your sense? That was an amazing quote. >> What's your >> Yeah. Well, I I'll I would say and and I actually think this is is I don't Sorry, I took a question. >> Okay. But maybe we maybe we could hold the questions till afterwards >> and and it does it does relate to this slide and that actually this the young students are surprisingly um they're holding on to that definition of hope is that many of them are able to hold the contradiction of not being optimistic while still wanting to participate in addressing it. I mean, it's it's it's it's what gives me a lot of hope and I'm and I'm actually I think that's a big part of it. And also teaching in the sciences is nice because we do have some sort of clear understanding of things that that that way of knowing about the world tells us quite a bit about climate change. doesn't tell us how to solve it or what to do about it. But um and then the humanities, you know, this is where a lot of work has been focused recently, especially when we're kind of hitting a wall with the partisanship and the ways that people are not able to, you know, the the level of denial we're seeing these days or even if it's not denial, the the lack of of um support for making any change. So we're looking at people people are writing a lot about human systems and how to imagine a different future and how to imagine transforming society where we start to address these things. And so living in this wonderful academic world that I live in it can feel hope more easily hopeful than maybe people dayto-day being addressing you know whatever their own focus is and feeling frustrated that they don't feel like they can do anything about what's happening. So um what I would like us to think about here is a kind of a concept of well all of these things whether you think of yourself as a scientist a social scientist a person in the humanities really can it's it's really we need to integrate all of them or or they are if we are going to be able to kind of understand how to build meaningful transformation and resilience. So I'll just pose that and and I'll and I'll allow that I'll I'll bring that up again so that we can actually have a conversation about it. So, I'm just going to take a couple minutes. Um, one of the ways that we uh start to get an opportunity to um feel like we're affecting things is to like write stuff down. Like if you're feeling like your mind I mean I feel like that's what happens, right? You get so your mind gets so chaotic trying to think about what am I supposed to do about climate change? It's inevitable. There's so much destruction. What can I do? I feel like one of the first things we can do kind of is actually to just see um what we know and think about it in a in sort of the in terms of understanding our earth system. So I'm just going to do a quick little thing um with you and just I'm going to pass pass out a sheet of paper and have you um I have a couple pens up here too and see if you can can you explain how the greenhouse effects works and climate change works. How many people feel like they can? Okay. >> How about you guys? A little pressure. Does anybody need a pen? >> And I'm gonna have you use this pen later, too. So, keep a hold of your head. Okay. Okay. So, what I'm going to ask you to do just very briefly is to draw what's going on with climate change. Um, I'll get I'll make it I'll give you a big hint so you don't get off the rails too quickly, but just in like two two minutes try to um show what kind of energy we get coming in from the sun. Um this is you know eighth grade physics where you learn about how energy moves. Um radiative energy comes from the sun. It doesn't it's one of those kind of energies that does not require there to be any material it travels through. Right? We know that um the sun has nuclear uh fusion going on at its center and sends us out tons of energy. Right? So we know the sun is our big source. The majority of energy that comes from the sun is in the light spectrum. So just start with light coming from the sun. And what I'd like you to do is have it come into our atmosphere and then what happens to it that causes that sort of is leading to the process of the greenhouse effect which is the premise of climate change. I feel like if we're going to talk about climate change we should everybody should at least have be able to very generally describe what it is. Just try we'll go through it. See what you know. I've done this with environmental science professors who couldn't do this. I mean it is something right think about it that this is something that we're worried about and talk about and and it just having a basic understanding is something I'd like us to start with right basic scientific understanding here and then I'm going to give you a second piece of it which is once you have the energy coming in and what happens to it add some greenhouse gases we know right we know that that's the cause of climate change especially fossil fuel burning we're adding a lot of CO2 right so add some green add some greenhouse gases And then what happens to that energy coming in the atmosphere? I know it's very I apologize. I was trying to save paper and also bringing it on the plane. I apologize for that. Sometimes I have a younger audience who can see the see it a little bit easier. Okay. Well, I'll put it up here. So, and and apologies for the draw. I did the drawing on on the computer. It's not very good. All right. So, okay. Did you do? All right. All right. So, this is just to show you we have all these energies kind of coming in from the sun. The sun's about n about 10,000 degrees Celsius or Kelvin, whatever. And so, we mostly get light from the sun. We do get some ultraviolet rays as you know. Um, those typically get blocked out for the most part by the ozone layer. Remember that? So they interact way up here in the atmosphere with with ozone 03 and most of the UVC we are protected from which is kind of an awesome function of our planet. I mean how amazing is that? Um we do get some in. We know we had an a hole that was created that allowed for some more to come in but that's repairing. That's some some good environmental news we'll start with today. Um, we also have infrared which we we experience as heat comes from the sun a little bit less but that actually mostly is is also trapped up in our atmosphere and gets kicked back out to space for the most part. Um, that's why if you want to see light from deep space um if which is usually it we it comes to us from very far so it's usually in the infrared spectrum. You have to put a satellite above our atmosphere. what mostly makes it and what's we get mostly from the sun is light which is so awesome. So we think about uh solar panels and that I mean that's that's what it works with. So we get a ton of energy well with that energy that comes in most of it gets kicked back out to space. So we have anything, you know, if you wear a white shirt, for example, on a hot day, on a sunny day, you stay a little bit cooler than wearing a black shirt, right? So we know, I won't go through the the physics of it, but we know that if it's a white color, you see things as white because it reflects all the light back out. So when that light comes in and hits things like uh, you know, giant land mass, glaciers, clouds, that light gets kicked back out to space. Anything that hits a darker surface, just like a black t-shirt, it gets absorbed, right? So, it gets absorbed by the dark earth and it gets, you know, second law of thermodynamics tells you that you get it some of it gets used up and then it gets kicked back out as a little bit less energetic infrared. So, that infrared is what is basically that heat is being given off from the earth. So it's the solar light absorbed by the earth and gives is given off from the earth as infrared and it starts to interact with those greenhouse gases and that sends that heat and makes it stick around. How do how do you guys feel like you did? Not too bad. Kind of like and you know it's called the greenhouse effect because it's kind of like a greenhouse. Lets the light in, doesn't let the heat out. So, those gases just kind of work. Um, this is one of my favorite diagrams because you always think it traps heat, but it's just they work by they absorb some of the energy and it shakes the molecule a little bit. There's names for all the different ways that this shakes the molecules, but this is super simple, simplified, but just to say we love the greenhouse effect on the planet because it keeps it warm enough for life to exist, right? Everything would be frozen without this effect here, right? And so we know that that we know how it works. And I think it's good for everybody to at least have this being being able to basically tell people this is very simple physics. Like pretty simple. I mean you I mean we just did this in like less than five minutes, right? We all just got a super quick lesson about anything we forgot. It's not so hard. Um and we know that this budget on the planet so this is you know the classic picture in all the textbooks and that uh so much we are at a steady state kind of situation. We were at a steady state situation for the most part and it changes but it's very slow moving where you have so much is absorbed so much is reflected back out. Um and then we basically keep a balance that keeps our average temperatures about the same. So, I'm not going to run through the whole thing, but I I will tell you what the upshot is. That in 1850 to 1900, which is a proxy for the pre-industrial era, the surface temperature was stable at about 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit. The 2024 global average surface temperature, which is the hottest year on record, was 59.2 degrees Fahrenheit. So, we are, this is no longer a steadystate budget. we are putting enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere mostly through fossil fuel burning um that is changing the steady state temperature. So that's that's it. I mean it's not really it it's a little more complicated than that but but we can see you know anybody who can use their mind through whatever ways that you've learn and and and think about things to recognize that if you do something like add greenhouse gases in an exponential rate to the atmosphere you are adding the potential to hold heat in. So, you know, they were we've had uh carbon dioxide levels that have been fairly stable for the last 800 uh thousand years. We we have many different ways to be able to tell that. Does anybody know a major way that you that you are able to um I'm not going to I'm not going to take a question, but I'm going to have to think in your own head. Do you know how we know that it was what the carbon dioxide levels were? >> You got it right there. >> Data. >> Yeah. Yeah. Icecore data is the major way that we are able to see um go down into the big glaciers and we actually take a look and see what the air looked like in the bubbles in the ice. It's pretty awesome. So, we have great data. We can see that in 2024 we were at 4 422.8 parts per million. So, it doesn't take you I mean it doesn't take a rocket science. It just takes some like practical sense to think well we're going to hold in more heat. And then it's not just CO2 as we know, right? There's other things like uh methane uh nitrous oxides and uh CFC's which were implicated in the ozone hole but they also when they when they stick down closer to the surface they actually act as greenhouse gases too. And so there's a concept called and and if you have more questions afterwards we could talk about all of these things. It's a little more complicated than I'm saying here but we have a CO2 equivalent. So, we said 422 um parts per million of carbon dioxide. If you add all the other things, we're up to about 573 parts per million in carbon dioxide equivalent. So, it just makes sense that this is I mean it just gives you a sense like that there's really isn't a big we know this this is like the best theory. It's probably a better theoretical, you know, in the scientific use of the word theory, which means that this all the best scientific information says that this is how it's working and nothing is really negating that. We've had this is the one of the best theories in science we've ever had and the physics is easy and it's not really that simple. I just so that's a little bit I mean understanding runaway greenhouse effect is not it's not really that simple. It's a system that involves many external things, many interactions and feedbacks between the different parts of our bi of our biosphere. So the atmosphere interacts with the vegetation and land surface and ocean and ice. Um for example, one of the really difficult things has been to understand how clouds work in this. Some clouds actually work to reflect a lot of light, but if a cloud is dark, it actually works to hold in a lot of uh infrared or heat energy too. So clouds have been really hard to model. bullet. But we we've done a really good job. We've actually gotten our understanding of how clouds interact with the system. Our models are working to these big giant climate system models are working to actually help us understand what we're seeing and help us make predictions on what we expect to see. So, it's not quite as simple as just understanding greenhouse runaway effect. It's actually it's actually some more, but we're doing an amazing job. Science is doing an amazing job at actually understanding this and helping us to understand what to expect. And so, um, just briefly, I want to say it's, you know, we know 2024 was the warmest year on record. Um, 2025 was the the third year on record, and I think 2026, they're thinking it's going to shape up to be about in the top five. Um, and we also know that the temperature is rising, um, but the warming is accelerating. that what we saw between 94 and 23 the amount of warming uh um was much greater than what we saw between uh 1900 and 2023. So it's happening faster. We have the data. I mean I don't know how so anyway you're here so you so you understand it and know it and and and and you don't have to believe it. You can just figure it out. Um and we are experiencing extreme weather events. So, what I want to talk briefly about are I mean, Hurricane Milton was a little bit more normal, but it just happened right after Hurricane Helen. We had two big ones that a row. My my brother's house was destroyed in both in Florida. Um, but Hurricane Helen, this is again in the mountain region of North Carolina. Um, one of many, and you know, I think we have stopped recording billion-dollar disasters officially, but this was a $60 billion disaster. um let alone the lives lost. So, one of the things to kind of show here is that if you take a look at the Gulf of Mexico, it was on an average of 29° Celsius or 85 degrees Fahrenheit um when it formed, you only really need a little over 26 degrees Celsius in order to actually form a hurricane. And these are the values for um the sea surface temperature um in 2023 and 2024 which was like way above the normal and that's significant. You're think you're talking about a huge body of water where the entire thing was a couple degrees warmer. Um, so we had these conditions that led to this, um, hurricane that went, you know, over 500 miles north, uh, um, and reached, I guess it was 46 miles hour winds when it hit Asheville, but we had gusts up to 106 miles hour, which caused the devastation you saw in those photos. And so, um, that was a big part was the the wind speed that came up, um, all the way into the mountains, um, and then the rains. So because it was a two, we had this blocking system that came in here which was our initial raining rain event and then the storm moved up this way and we had uh in some places 30 inches of rain total in three days and what that did was we have several test so Asheville itself is in a valley um that has the French Broad River went through it. Most of our damage, our wind damage was everywhere. The trees were down, but our water damage came uh by the river flooding. All of the small communities around it, we have all these great little mountain towns. Several of them were completely 100% wiped out because when you have 30 inches of rain that come down a mountain, your entire town is 20t underwater. So, Hot Springs, um Barnard'sville, uh Swanoa, we lost whole towns through this kind of like 30 30 inches of rain. And this is, you know, it was averaged, I think, somewhere around 12 to 15 inches of rain after 3-day events in our local communities. Um, so, all right, got that out of the way. That's the unhopful part. Now, to start the conversation on hope. Um, so science does, you know, science does tell us the we observe and take measurements to kind of see the level of destruction and devastation. Well, science can also in that way of viewing the world and thinking about the world, we can also feel some level of hope through understanding things like science uh mitigation and adaptation. I mean I mean this hopefully most people here understand if you want to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere. You're using reusable renewable energy sources, making energy efficient buildings, increasing the use of um low emission or no emission transportation. Um and then we're adapting. We're finding ways that while we have this warming occurring so how can we build towns cities to actually function better upgrade your flood your protection from flood and fire um I've heard of some of the people talking here about some strategies uh for for fire we are dealing a lot of strategies for flooding you know reeding thinking about our food system in terms of climate resiliency um establishing um native populations providing ways for populations to migrate and move as they need too. Um and and we you know this at sort of at the at the center of this we have these kind of regenerative processes like restoring native vegetation, conserving water that actually does a little bit of both. So I I mean this is the part the world we kind of like all of us who are interested and concerned about climate change can feel a little bit of hope that we actually know how to do some of these things. Um whether this makes you feel hopeful or mortified depends on on on how you want to look at it. But there are some things here. We also have geoengineering which are ways that we can kind of think about um this is a huge one in Asheville right now. Um biochar because we have so much biomass where you can actually kind of turn it into um soil amendment. So you kind of char it at low temperatures which you can do with with non- fossil fuel related heating and you can put it back into the soil where it will get stored for a really long time. So all that carbon dioxide that was lost through the tree loss we're going to try to restore it to the soil. Um, there's a bunch of different things. I'm not going to run through these, but some of them are more scary than others, like adding a bunch of particullet up to the stratosphere to make the light get blocked out so it doesn't make its way down here. Um, but anyway, so depending on how you feel about it, some of these feel hopeful and some of them feel, like I said, a little bit hopefully we don't get there, but if we are in an emergency, it is nice to think that we have people kind of thinking about ways that we could that we could address some of the the the uh aspects of warming. Okay. And I would say I live a lot in this world where I try to find hope in it. I run a research program for undergraduates where uh all of their their projects are related somehow to sustainability and climate change. And the year that after Helen happened the summer of 2025 um we had great student projects. So I just want to shout out to some of my students who worked on looking at the effects on the aquatic species in the river. um looking at I mean we lost on even on campus entire hillsides of trees and so students working with ecoforesters to kind of come up with a restoration plan very complicated the invasives the the uh um Asian bittersweet um of several things are actually we may have to actually put herbicide all over the entire thing and purposely plant trees later but just seeing a new generation of students who are not in not despairing and wanting to take on some of these projects. Um, students working on we have these special mountain bogs by us and and flowers that actually they're rare plants that actually liked the disturbance and these mountain bogs actually worked really well to absorb a lot of the water. So, some of these environments actually worked really well in flooding um and kind of unique environments. Um and then we're doing a lot of planting of rivercane. A rivercane is a excuse me very um special species to the eastern band of Cherokee. We have a large um population of um uh a large actually um boundary where uh the Cherokee live near us and they've been kind of working and and and helping to kind of reintroduce river cane planting along the um rivers where it was planted previous to the storm. uh these were areas that actually survived. I mean it was like remarkable the the capacity they had for absorbing the flood waters. So I have a lot of hope in this but again at the end of the day it's I don't it it's it's great but I also don't want to put the burden on the students to be you know all my hope in solving the future problems in the world especially when we're leaving them this world. So, these are some of some of my students who are doing things like this is my office where they're coming in and they're starting to do things like um quilting for climate change. Um, which has really been a powerful experience um with the students. It's it's very therapeutic. I can't quilt very well. I think that one's mine right there, but I can't sew. I don't really know what I'm doing, but it was just getting people to sit and talk a little bit about our experience and what we went through. Um the the climate there is a national climate quilt program uh which is similar to the AIDS quilt work where they're collecting quilts and hopefully eventually we'll find a place uh to display uh people kind of joining in community to address this. I thought it was going to be being wanting to be productive. I thought it was going to be frustrating that why am I doing this and wasting my time when I could be out there, you know, doing cleanup work or or research. Um um and that was one of the first things that sort of started to jog in me a need to kind of move beyond just these scientific solutions and for if I'm going to find hope. Um I also have students who are um planning doing ocean planning and fossil fuel transformation planning through playing games. Um, so I have a lot of lot of great science students and students who are typically I mean some of these same students doing those research projects are the students of getting involved in art projects related to climate change. Um, okay. So as I said if human caused climate change is one of the strongest scientific theories ever. Um, why are we and we're really not doing everything we can imagine to mitigate it. So why why wouldn't we be in despair, right? in many ways um it's an extremely important question to understand and I feel like what we have is uh social science has been sort of helpful to kind of get us to the point where we can at least try to address the question of why aren't we doing anything um nothing I'm not solving anything with today's ideas right they haven't been solved but you know when we know we have people telling us that um we need to adapt to the new world disorder um we're kind of hitting the point of no to turn a hellish hot house of earth getting closer. Um, in Asheville, and I don't know how much you have here, and I'd be curious at the end to talk about it. We had a lot of conspiracy theories. Um, Asheville is, uh, kind of a mountain community of artists, um, musicians, uh, academics, and all around it, uh, it's a poor rural communities. And out of many of those communities, um there were major major conspiracy theories that made it into the New York Times and and um you know um this is our Chuck Edwards is our um senator who repl our congressman who replaced um Madison Cawthorne just to kind of give you a sense of of kind of the politics locally. Um he had to put out bulletins debunking some of the the conspiracy theories. But the the major conspiracy theory was that uh the government was targeting the area, like changing the weather to target the area to take over some of the land for lithium mining. And there was also I mean and and you're laughing, but these are like my neighbors like these are these are people around me who really deeply, you know, took guns to keep FEMA out because they felt like the government had done this. So this great sense of distrust. um this harp which is a Alaskan research project about high frequency they shoot up high frequency um rays into the ionosphere where the aurora borealis forms and if you know like atoms take in energy and it kicks the electron up and when the electron falls back down it put makes light which is the aurora borealis it's a process that happens every day and they they attack they said this lab was changing the weather and this and this is like ser super serious like enough like I said that they are chasing rescue workers out because it was they were convinced that this is what's happening. So, and you know, Noah had to put out an entire factchecking page debunking the weather modification claims and things like that. So, so obviously no matter how much science we have and how much simple understanding we can put out there and sort of hope everybody at least understands what's going on, um it's not really necessarily it's not enough. it's not enough to actually move us in a direction. So, you know, I find some hope in our the movement of our social science to address how do you start dealing with denial or or just some some of it I don't think is denial. I think it's just sort of willful um >> misinformation. >> Yeah. Well, and willful and and really exploitation and and and really kind of weaponized misinformation. Um, and I we we do understand like I there are a lot of people who believe those con conspiracy theorists in our area have uh deeply um strong community ties uh much much of it through religion um or just like long-term family communities in the area. And so there's been a ton of work going on on how to talk to people. Um, you know, some of it is actually don't focus on the words climate change, focus on energy efficiency, clean water, things that everybody can at least get agreement on. Um, that don't quite cause the same levels of conspiracy theories. But there's also, you know, some of these are listed here, these psychological insights on why people hold on to these. It's a perfectly honestly reasonable psychological response or reaction to go into denial about things when you feel so overwhelmed by them. or I I I won't I don't know if I'd say reasonable, but it's common. It's a very common thing. When you can't when you are feeling like overwhelmed by it, you'll just go into denial. And so, how do you actually not challenge people's integrity or intelligence and actually start to listen to them and try to get some insight into where they are coming from and you might not be able to do anything about it. It might be a lot of listening and asking them if they will listen to you and why you feel like you also have integrity and have and have a reason for understanding it in a different way. Um, and I just I'm not going to go through this too much, but there's a couple great people to look up. Katherine Heiho, did people recognize that name? She's the lead climate scientist at the Nature Conservancy, also teaches at Tech Texas Tech. Um, and she uh is doing tons of work. She came I think for free talk to us for like 15 minutes online. She's just trying to get out there and just how to talk to climate skeptics. Um and Kathleen Biggins has started an organization called uh sea change conversations and she goes to a lot of uh corporate offices and talks to people. So we have people who are making inroads on addressing people who don't want to you know either don't you know through disbelief or through actively not wanting to address climate change situations. So I do there's really wonderful people out there working on this right now and large groups of people and I and this just is a picture saying you know we do have people we had the the age of the Hummer and we do have EV Hummers now so even in the kind of consumer culture and stat you know status culture uh we have made some changes and you know smoking really has we've had changes so there is kind of hope in kind of keeping track learning from those other experiences on how to change minds Um and I would say through kind of the mixture of science and social science we are developing um pretty like in the mainstream I would say globally not necessarily the United States right now but a lot of our paradigms to address problems environmental problems are really rooted in thinking of ecology and the health of ecosystems as the most important thing to address. So this is huge and this has really happened in in the past 15 years. Um and just quickly to run through you know we how many of you have seen this like triple bottom line for sustainability where you want people profit and planet all to work together for something to be sustainable sometimes said it like economics social and and ecology. Well, we have kind of all the all the textbooks, you know, all of our research kind of shows that really we are kind of moving to a triple bottom line where environment and the planet kind of is surrounds you. You have to have a healthy environment to have a healthy society and people to have a healthy um economics system. and that is being used in in strategic planning um at economic forums at you know development forums where that really was not the way that we started out with sustainable development. We have things like the Rawworth donut. The e economist um Kate Rawworth brought together the science which looks at um areas of environmental um overshoot past the point of being safe. So there's this is the planetary boundaries like land conversions and freshwater withdrawals. She added kind of an economics and social level to it saying we also have a social foundation not just a ceiling that we're s that we're passing to the point of no return to a tipping point but we actually need to kind of include things like social equity political voice in our kind of modeling of strategies for how to address development issues. Um so we are moving in that direction and even um you know this is mainstreaming this is now what the United Nations projects are working on. Um it that's kind of amazing that that sort of is a big shift that we are seeing where it's not just development kind of where if you economically develop society will be better and we'll take better care of our environment. We kind of realize that's not the way it works. So a huge paradigm shift happening which is really exciting. Um, also even in things like we're really seeing the connectivity that environmental issues are just issues. They're not environmental just environmental issues. And this is, you know, how many of you have seen the the the uh um the uh sustainable development goals. Um, and these are it's I I'm a little heartbroken to bring this up because we are as the United States are not supporting these right now, but we had for a long time and they're still the rest of the world is. They are all seeing the interconnectivity of all of these different ways of approaching global problems from poverty to gender disparities and these kind of things. And sort of the new and again these are models but these are models that many many projects are coming out of and the new model is kind of they call it the wedding cake model where actually again even these goals to show their interconnectivity we're kind of showing that they're all rooted in ecological health. So these green goals are you know healthy uh aquatic systems uh you know life below the water life on the land um energy and climate action all really at the basis of working on these. So any projects that kind of come out of using these paradigms of sustainable development goals are really kind of rooted in ecology. I mean this is this is bringing me hope and also a lot of it we are actually moving through um participatory action research which has been around for a couple decades now where really instead of kind of a lot of top- down models of research and research being what you feel like working on and you telling people what they need. A lot of it has come from this paradigm where you actually ask people what they need and you actually have people collect their own data and information and stories and you as a researcher just sort of guide the process and you help bring in maybe any understanding that you have through your um sort of western education or you know and and you actually uh and and formalized academic education but you work with local knowledge um and local efforts to contribute because you get a lot more buy in. Um I I just want to show you quickly this I know you can't read this but we have frameworks now where science projects, social science projects, interdisciplinary projects really work with answering the questions of and getting the information from the groups that we're asking that we're trying to address the problems. So, um, Jame Goodall's, uh, uh, Lake Tenyan Yika catchment, uh, reforestation education project was a big example of that, but we're doing a lot of this in Asheville, too. We have a hub where you can actually, um, get online and contribute anything from a narrative to data about your property. And we're actually trying to work together as a community to figure out and imagine what we would like to see in recovery. Um, I also want to say that the justice movements have really aligned in the past decade or two. So that's not really just, you know, environmental justice or climate justice. It's actually groups working together from indigenous rights and and justice, anti-colonial resistance, um, the LGBT uh, QIA++ justice, racial justice, migrant justice, labor justice. A lot of these movements are really seeing the interconnectivity and working and aligning uh their goals and their initiatives to address and understand how uh climate change is involved in all of these. So I teach some of this and we look at some of these justice movements and see now that you know this is an example climate justice is landback and and colonialism justice and so people are seeing the interconnectivity in a way that it is there is a lot that is bringing me hope that we are not trying to address this as isolated problems and that this is just a scientific problem. um you know things like uh Soulfire Farm which we have in New York State which is actually um a black farmer movement uh to actually address education, food sovereignty, climate change. We're seeing a lot of these smaller scales things happening and they're serving as f this serves as a fantastic model for other groups trying to start these kind of things around. Um so just to kind of end so I am I my where I'm kind of having my epiphany and I would like to share with you and and this hope so um what can you do like what can you do like where is your hope how many people in here are scientists and how many people are social scientist and how many people are artists >> artists. Oh, >> okay. So, we have some people in here and I I think we've shown some things that, you know, like you can look at, but many of us are just trying to figure out what what do we do and how do we kind of work on this transformation we have and I would say that a lot of this is out there for us to explore. Um I don't have an answer to that question but remember when we're talking in hope in terms of getting you motivated to do something to participate to not feel paralyzed and just say what really came out we had a symposium a year after hurricane Helen um and we really integrated this is this is um I had my science research students write the panels for a photography exhibit um and we worked together as an entire campus to have all kinds of areas of we had a music performance which I actually performed in the music performance area too. I also led a meditation. So we tried we we basically worked together as faculty, staff and students to come together to process what we went through to think about how to move forward. And this was one of the most hopeful things that I've ever participated in. And it really came from bringing people together who typically don't work together or seeing ways that you don't think people um you know people we all care about climate change and so seeing all the multiple ways that people are able to address it. And so I just wanted to offer a couple things here. Um you know this book ministry for the future really kind of got me to one of the first places to be like we need everybody. We need every strategy we can possibly have. Um, and also, uh, just to see that that's kind of the thing we need to do. So, these are three books. These are three books I would recommend that are, you know, not local, but these are three books that came out of the hurricane itself in Asheville. Um, but really having the empathy for others going through things and also just the inspiration and the imagination to think about what to do. So, these have been ways that our community has been healing together. Um, poetry I can I can go a lot more into this and I know that there's a poetry series here too has been huge in terms of ways to actually process things that and it's not just processing emotions. It's intellectually processing and understanding of the world we live in and and where we can fit in into under into contributing and not feeling paralyzed. Um there's a couple of links here. We had um the Swaninoa is one of the rivers that flooded by us and it's a kind of a visual and poetic exploration of what happened. Um our um former poet laurate Ala Leone has actually on our national climate um plan which actually the government took offline but another organization put it back online. um she actually offers a poetry introduction to our national climate system and so and I understand that Dear Human has quite a few San Francisco poets in it. Um wonderful book. I mean when I really like need inspiration to like think about and motivate and move. Um I I it just this way of of letting my mind work in a different way than my scientific analytical mind. um and just really not understanding exactly how it works because that's not my background, but understanding what it does for me. And I just want to end here. Um on the back of your sheet, I all these words that I put up here, I'm not going to read through them, but I but I'm first and foremost have been trained as a scientist. Um my system science makes me transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, like understanding how systems are connected. And I just want to say, you know, and I want you to read this just on your own, but I want to just end with kind of saying here where Donna Meadows, who wrote limits to growth like in the 70s with with a couple other folks and wrote and and is kind of the the sort of expert on systems theory and and really got us really was part of the the group of intellectuals who kind of unders really came out with being able to um teach people about how the systems theory works if you were, you know, not not in in the original um group of people working on it. But she says we have within us the ability to wonder, the intelligence to understand and the love to care about that which we wonder at. I try to play with these abilities within myself and within others and in them I always find hope. And I think you know when we are looking at these kind of things um one dimension is not necessarily what is you might have to try different things on different days uh to see what gets you to be motivated beyond this kind of sadness and grief and despair that you feel and find a way to ex to un to feel that uh wonder to feel that calmness to feel whatever it takes you need that day in order to kind of have hope after in the face of and after such devastation that we see from change. And so I just want to open it up I guess here and say um where do you find hope? Is the hopeful frame useful to you? >> Thank you audience for being so attentive and u Casey King on behalf of the library. Thank you so much and please give another a round of applause for our presenter today.