Queers, creatives: start meeting your local climate tech movers and shakers

(A biased round-up of TEDxLacamas Lake Countdown on 15 November 2023)

Note: I use quotation marks when I can quote directly, and tildes (~) where I did my best to paraphrase.

Other note: You can also read this post on LinkedIn here.

Yesterday I was one of several dozen thinkers and workers in climate tech gathered at TEDxLacamas Lake Countdown. As someone with an MFA in Playwriting who is trying to break into climate tech as a writing coach, I experienced a kind of double-dissonance: I felt like I was both crashing their party—and welcoming them into my world—as the event was hosted in a theatre, (Vancouver Washington’s gem: The Magenta Theatre.)

I’m writing this because I’m trying to understand (and support) the role of storytelling in climate tech, an emergent field that runs the risk of embracing alleged superheroes. I believe, broadly, that climate tech needs to embrace braver, more original ways of telling stories that engender a sense of shared purpose. 

This piece reads a bit like a theatre review; I felt a bit like a critic, swapping between my knitting needles and notebook while listening to each speaker’s 15-minute schpiels. But unlike a (traditional) critic, I’m less interested to judge or comment than I am in sharing about the connections I’m making between the discrete ideas that were discussed one at a time—and particularly through the lens of storytelling (as is my prerogative.) 

I walked away with optimism for next year’s event: I’m looking forward to seeing the separate yarns between so many disciplines and industries become even more knitted together. But—and this is my bias—I crave authenticity and creativity in those intersections.

I happen to subscribe to speaker Spenser Meeks's hypothesis about how to do this. “Tell. More. Stories.” 

He pointed to the fact that there is, astonishingly, unanimous scientific agreement about the effectiveness of storytelling as a force of influence. As a once-actor who now coaches professionals in developing and delivering their pitch decks, his wisdom is ultimately for the types of people who we saw onstage. ~Your information may be great, but your presentation will fall flat if your scale and sequence is all wrong.~ (In fact, he volunteered to help the other presenters during the remarkably short period of time they all had to prepare.)

The compatibility of climate tech and storytelling is promising. At times, the event felt a bit like a meet-cute. At one point between sessions I caught an attendee swoon as theatre manager Peter Wonderly walked by—she gasped and said, to her friend, “Look at his cute Orville Reddenbacker tie!”

The event’s organizer Katherine Radeka was thoughtful to integrate artistic expression into the programming throughout. Poet Emett Wheatfall opened with a poem that memorably associated Maya Angelou’s “caged bird” with the proverbial canary in a coalmine. Sara Tone welcomed us back from lunch with a song whose refrain was “a prayer for here right now on Gaia’s sacred space station”—a characteristically PNW marriage of spirituality and sci-fi. Alex Gamboa Grand, MBA seemed to speak directly to artists and content writers when speaking about the importance of ~using consumer influence as a way to control corporations’ levers of power~.

I found myself thinking quite a lot about the parallels between the theatre community, the climate tech community, and (stay with me) the queer community—all places where one can find themselves connected with people who they have absolutely nothing else in common with. (What do a nonbinary gen Z-er and a couple of old moneyed gays have in common? Maybe just a queer bookstore, but that can be enough to create a sense of shared purpose.) It was easy to find dots to connect across presentations. For example, after John Mead from Solid Carbon told us that the concrete comprising Burnside Skate Park has the remarkable distinction of having been made using a verifiably carbon-neutral process called pyrolysis—another speaker (Katherine Rose) slipped in the detail that [she’s] a skater, and suddenly I wanted to know if Portland skaters are telling their national community about Solid Carbon. A few minutes later, Kathryn Latham made a spontaneous connection to the work Depave, which she had just learned about, along with most of us.

This gets to why I think queers, artists, and writers have indirect roles to play in the climate tech space. How can our skills and talents transfer and contribute? At least three speakers used the phrase “everything everywhere all at once” (and not in reference to the movie.) Artists and writers, we pride ourselves on making meaning, coherence, and engagement out of complex ideas. Our tools include sensitivity, intuition, and emotion. Can we use our creativity to find ways to contribute to the climate tech space and spend a little less time developing work whose echoes fade quickly in our social siloes?

Needless to say, I found that the most engaging moments of the day were the ones in which speakers (knowingly or not) took Spenser’s advice.

Alison Wiley's talk about electric school buses felt among the most thoughtfully integrative of storytelling and data. She immersed the audience in an entirely plausible narrative about a heatwave in 2027 full of specific, human details; when she told us that “Arturo” is particularly vulnerable due to being among the 1-in-15 children living with asthma, the person in front of me began shaking his head in vociferous empathy.

Marketing copywriter David Kirshbaum named the connection between emotion and climate directly, naming the extreme anxiety felt by adults and especially children, and the slimy marketing strategy of associating carbon use with patriotism. James Metoyer III seemed to offer a direct alternative to this—pointing to the ways in which Advanced Energy Inspections facilitates training programs that lead new BIPOC contractors to “tap into meaningfulness” and approach their work as a way in which to invest in their community. Meaning-making played a role in Kenny Lee's presentation, as he shared quite personal details about how his family’s brushes with cancer motivated his transition into carbon capture technology. Emotion can provide both push and pull; Alex Wick (of Cascadia Carbon) described the ~shame of being made to feel like a carbon hypocrite~, while Frank Dick shared his dream of communities taking pride in their relationship to their own poop by implementing technology that can generate electricity at wastewater plants. ~We could have a Poopsie Day festival!~ he suggested—with humor, but not sarcasm. 

Yes, the speakers did point to some major obstacles to implementation. As Gina McCoy Gina McCoy points out about [Forest-to-Farm] that ~even when the technology exists, they are undervalued and under resourced.~  But I find myself wanting to hear more about how the climate tech community is learning how to address forces of conflict, miscommunication, and social polarization. Places where I think queers and artists can step in.

Somewhat of an aside: I was very struck by the feeling of Vancouver during my lunchtime walk. A team of workers were preparing to open a completely independent brick-and-mortar bookstore down the block. A trio of men loudly traded vaccine conspiracy theories at a coffee bar serving Stumptown Coffee. When I asked a handful of public employees from Vancouver what makes their city unique, they told me about the community’s spirit of pragmatism, which allows folks to work well together across political divides.

Yo, I wanna hear more about THAT.

Kenny Lee emphasized the importance of building trust with a community before trying to initiate change, and Juan Barraza used “trust” to name the overlapping region of community and innovation in a venn diagram. But I’m eager to hear founders and leaders teaching each other how to invest more attention and intention in building that trust within our communities and constituencies when they’re not simply customers. That’s what sets climate tech apart (or it should be.)

We don’t know where the world’s headed but we’re not the first multi-stakeholder community to enter into the unknown. As Teja Chatty suggested, companies bake bad decisions into their designs when they fail to account for the fact that uncertainties exist. They pretend there’s such a thing as a guarantee.

If we want to equip ourselves with the skills and methods that can help us continue making connections and building coalitions, we need to use the technologies of storytelling, performance, and expression, which have historically been used to help communities navigate crisis, conflict, and uncertainty.

“All organizing is science fiction,” said Katherine Rose, quoting adrienne maree brown (philosopher and author of Pleasure Activism and We Will Not Cancel Us, two of the most important books I’ve ever read.) Katherine described a block party, which marked the transformation of one of Portland’s deadliest intersections into a community-designed public space. The event was hosted under a tapestry made—by unhoused community members–out of tents that had been cleared by the city. 

I want to see us all getting more creative about how we couple personal expression with design and branding.

So… if you have a creative skill: consider what you can help a founder do. And if you’re a founder or organizer in the inherently creative field of climate tech: consider how to integrate personal expression into your work. Like queerness, like a passion for theatre, like a desire for a better world—storytelling is a broad common denominator, but it’s often all you need to bring together a community.

Follow TEDxLacamas Lake Countdown on LinkedIn here and review the program here.