Imagining a Better Future

keep Sena. Welcome to Wika f Daily with Me your Girl Danielle Moody recording from the Home Bunker. You know, folks, everywhere that you look as it pertains to the climate crisis, it's bad right now. I believe that over thirty of the states in Nigeria or underwater. You wouldn't be hearing that from our news because we could give a fuck about the continent of Africa or any of its countries.

But just to give you a quick picture, Nigeria is responsible for like three percent of the carbon emissions, but is now being hit with the overwhelming impact of climate change that they didn't cause Right now, as I report this, over six hundred Nigerians are dead, over a million have

been displaced. And if this sounds familiar, it should because it was just maybe two months ago that I was telling you the same story, except it was Pakistan that has been underwater, most of the fucking country underwater because of an uncharacteristic historic monsoon season. How many times do we have to hear the word his doric right in order for us to recognize that these things are historic.

They are our new abnormal. This is the reality of how the world is moving because of what wealthy industrial countries that are largely white lead countries have done. And it is the browner and black countries that are going to be the ones that face the most harm first. But know that these conditions, these storms, these floods, these fires, right are also happening in the United States. Case in point, what just happened in Florida. Right. My younger cousin is

down there doing some of the demolition. Right. These homes are completely and totally destroyed, and he's been sending pictures home so that we can see and he's like, it looks like a war zone. He's like I mean, these people have lost absolutely everything, and there's no way to see even what rebuilding is going to look like because we have so much damage to remove. And what I say here is that the cost of ignorance is expensive.

It is in the billions. And yet people continue to vote for Republicans who disavow climate changes and as even being a problem because they don't give a fuck, because they keep thinking to themselves, by the time it's a real issue, you know, I'll be dead, right, or maybe I'll have enough money to join Basos and the rest

of them on their rocket ships off of this fucking rock. Right, the future in a lot of ways as we are looking at it, and as young people generation Z is getting ready to take over the helm and enter into the workforce, are looking around and they're like, what is this keeping pile of shit that you were leaving to us.

I don't think any other generation before Generation Z has an outlook that looks so fucking bleak, right, And No, we've had past wars, we've had, you know, civil rights uprisings, we've had, but we haven't had them all at once. And that's where we are. And so I'm really excited today for the conversation that I am going to share

with all of you. That provides some level of hope, right, that provides some level of I don't know, imagination, that allows us to dream of something different and something better. I've talked about on this show that at the beginning of the pandemic in twenty twenty, I got into African futurism, and you know, I needed to be taken away from the current state and crisis that we were dealing with

and just be able to imagine and be in other worlds. Well, I'm not the only one that feels this way, and my next guest, Tory Stevens, is an award winning storyteller who focuses primarily on climate fiction. The worlds he creates serve as a means of raising awareness to the ongoing

climate crisis. But get this, He started a and founded the Imagine twenty two hundred climate fiction initiative at Grist magazine with Fixed Labs, and the idea was for people to submit their stories of a uplifting climate future, something that wasn't dystopian. Can we if we can imagine all of the bad, can we imagine some of the good that could actually happen as it pertains to our climate.

With all of the information and education that we have at our fingertips, is it possible to create other worlds that are good? And so my conversation with Tori I really left feeling uplifted because I think that fictional writing and fiction films allow us to imagine world different from what we are experiencing right now. And I think now more than ever, a lot of us need some type of escapism, something to be hopeful about and hopeful for. And I think that the twenty two hundred Climate Fiction

Initiative is that right. Tori will talk to us about the fact that they in the first year that they did it, they were overwhelmed with the amount of submissions, and he will talk about who the winners are and

where they're coming from. But you know, the idea here is that he started writing climate fiction after heavily looking into afrofuturism and being inspired by the protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd, And so imagining something good out of something so tragic is sometimes where we need to go. Because I'll tell you that reality these days feels really really stark, and I wouldn't mind taking the time to imagine something much better than our present. So coming up

next my conversation with Tory Stevens. Hey there, I want to tell you about another podcast I think you'll love. The Brown Girl's Guide to Politics, hosted by a Shanty Gohler, the president of Emerge BGG, is the one stop shop for women of color who want to hear and talk

about the world of politics. Join a Shanty this season as she talks to incredible women of color who are changing the face of politics and tackling some of the most important issues facing the United States, from reproductive justice to voting rights, to climb to change, and more. Tune

in every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts, Folks. I am very excited to welcome to Woke f Daily for the very first time, Tory Stevens, who is the founder and creative manager of Imagine twenty two hundred, a climate fiction initiative at Fix, which is Gris's climate solution lab. Tory, let's start out with Imagine twenty two hundred, because my god, do I want to imagine something other than twenty twenty two So tell me, so tell us about about Imagine

twenty two hundred. Yeah, thank you for that, thank you for having me as well. I guess I'll start with that's the premise of this, that's the point of this. The point is to get outside of our everyday usual kind of dreams, musings that we have around what we want out of life. And so by situating a climate fiction, it's a contest that we have. We advertise globally, so we're getting folks. The first year we got one thousand, one hundred stories. We're now in the second year and

we got six hundred stories. We tampered down the advertising because we had too many stories. It was really hard to read all those stories, and we do want to honor all the stories that come in. So the whole idea is to get people to think about the future. What is the future that you want and what is the future that we all deserve. What does an abundant future look like where we care for folks, where we care for the planet, where we care for our non

human kin, the animals that live here as well. What does that look like? You know, so many writers when we asked them to, you know, look at the prompt and they encountered it online or wherever they found it,

maybe in a college or in a writing community. They said, no, they've never they never thought to write about hopeful, intersectional and resilient, abundant futures where we're winning were where the world has this imbued with justice, where it's just like a strong world that has all these things kind of

being held in a good way. And so after asking that question, there's some folks that have, like I would say, the solar punk community, which is a genre, and those folks they often ideate and write around hopeful futures that were technology technology and people are working together in harmony. But many of the writers, not all of them, come

from the solar punk community. Again, this is a global contest, so some folks haven't even heard of the term solar punk and they come from another angle of this, and they were really excited to write about something hopeful as it relates to the climate and as it relates to how humans interact with each other. No, I love it, and I love the idea so much. I mean I joke on wok af on a regular basis that, like you know, I just hold onto a mustard seed of hope these days. So it is, you know, it is.

It is very hard, I think when you have been showcased just such a dystopian future, right. Anytime you know that we have looked at science fiction, when we've looked at fantasy, it's always been placed with well, Earth has collapsed and so now we're in space or we're still on Earth. But it is, it is this tribal war, you know, situation. And you know the question that I want to ask you too, and I'm assuming that this is kind of where you're the idea originated, is that

black people and brown people were written out of sci fi. Right. It wasn't until the likes of you know, the late brilliant Octavia Butler that we began to see a future that saw us in it. And so I want you to speak to speak to that and why this initiative

too is so important because of who is doing the writing. Yeah, that's that's definitely an important part of this, which is that we want to show futures, as Adrian ree Brown says, futures have black people in it, Futures have brown people and indigenous people where we will be there and not only will we be there, Because this is a part that I talk about a lot. We often have black or brown folks in stories adjacent or but they have no culture to them. So I always say I don't

want I don't want lego people in my stories. And what I mean by that is I don't want to be able to take the head off and be able to remove and switch the people. And it doesn't matter like you could you made a scientist, you made that scientist black or brown because you name check that, but you didn't add all the culture that comes with black folks. You didn't add all the culture that comes with Caribbean and folk. Some of the stories we have shown up

this year. We have the story that won for this year takes place in Jamaica. We have another story that's from Trinidad, and we have another story from Rwanda. And I think that's just like incredible. The thing that makes it incredible is that they're not just lego people. They have all this culture that is a part of the story. So you mentioned sci fi science fiction always taking place

in space. Often you see this kind of like you know, sanitized version of the world where there's this spaceship and people have on the same materials or like, but there's that that's not like how life is even in the future, even if people did live on spaceships, they're going to have their own vernacular, They're going to have their own culture, ways of being, ways of movement, they will be danced, they would just be people who one thing we will show up with is culture. And so that's a big

thing that we're trying to do. It imagine is say, hey, we're doing climate fiction, but we want climate fiction that is just as important it is to address the climate crisis. It's also important that the characters feel real in like folks that I would hang out with or are from my family, so black, brown, indigenous, Yeah, just really want that piece of it. And I guess I would also

layer in that we want intersectional characters. You know, culture is important, but all these other identities like is the person working class? What up with my queer folks? Like what you know, don't erase them from the stories as well. And the whole goal is one is this is how the world is. Right. Our world is rich and beautiful and vibrant, so let's show it as it is. But also I want people to see themselves in these climate futures like ways, I want people to see that day

two can be a part of the climate solution. And the fact is, like frontline folks are already fighting, Like you have folks in Cancer Alley and Louisiana, black brown folks who are fighting against new plastic um. There's like a plastic company that was going to move in there that they fought and removed from from building a new facility because all those facilities have caused UM. I mean, there's a reason that's called Cancer Alley. You know, it's

a very sad reason. But people are fighting on the front lines right now. And those people that are fighting on the front line are most likely black and brown. Because the climate crisis is not equal. You know, our folk have um disproportionately been you know, put next to oil, um, what do you call it, oil derricks, oil refineries, plastic places, anything that's kind of like, you know, just not beautiful.

And this isn't I'm making like an um, It's not always the case, but better believe that, you know, the very wealthy are not living right next to these kind of like factories and plants where um, you know, there's abnormally high cancer rate. Yeah, you know, and I think to that point, well, one first I want to pick up the Jamaicans that one, because my family is Jamaican American. I'm Jamaican American. My family so from Jamaica, So pick

them up. And I can't wait to read that. But you know, I think too to your last point with regard to who is disproportionately impacted from the climate crisis, we're seeing it right now, right, We're seeing it as these hurricanes, um, you know, land and stay over Caribbean islands, over low lying um you know, Api islands like and

these places, and we're saying, who are these people? Right what we saw in Pakistan, right, we saw you know, over eleven hundred lives lost, right to what they keep saying, are these historic monsoons, historic seasons, And yet we're not doing anything for the people who are putting out one percent right of the carbon emissions, and they're dealing with

ninety nine percent of the problems. So, you know, I want to also talk about is it important to you as well, while you're framing this around hopefulness, around a future that we can all see ourselves in, is it also really important to hold up the truth of how how our future can in fact sadly look like what has been genre as dystopian, right, Like I brought up Pakistan. We can look at Puerto Rico, we can look at Kansas, we can look at Florida, we can you know, look

at Germany and France and Australia that lost a billion animals. Like, the future doesn't look bright. So how important is it to juxtapose the hopefulness with the reality that people are finally starting to see. Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say that, you know, this project is focused on hope, right, And the reason we do that is we're trying to carve out a space for people to dream about the future that we want. I'm not saying

that dystopian stories are not important. I think they're really important. They tell of a future that we could have, and for some folks, they are living that future right now. It's just that middle class folks are going to start to feel that pain as well. White folks are going to start because if you ask the folks in Cancer Alley if they're live in a dystopian future, they're going to say yes. Ask the people in Pakistan or they live in a dystopian future right now, they're going to

say yes. The folks in Puerto Rico. I would say, like there's been mixed you know, dystopian with like I've seen some real resiliency there where folks have kind of brought together and come together as a community. But it's really important that we carve out space for hope, because hope looks different to different people, and I want to explore that. I think I've found myself looking at hope in the middle of the pandemic and charged with founding

and starting. All we knew is we wanted to bring climate fiction to Grist magazine, but we didn't know that what that would look like. And I was like, wait, we're going to be talking about hope in this moment. It's really tough. But then once we started, I started receiving the stories, I started reading them, and I started seeing all the visions that people have of the world where we're working together in concert to bring climate solutions

to all folks. It was life changing. Is probably like a too big of a word, but like it was close to that, like maybe even that's true. You know, it has changed my perspective on hope. I would say that I was someone who looked at hope from I hope that things are going to be better. But now I see hope. It's like a praxis. And so this

is why sometimes I'm not dogging dystopian stories. I think that they're important, but I think there's too many of them and not enough hopeful visions of what our world could look like. So you know, we have Black Mirror, we have Squid Games, we have Stranger Things. I mean, you can just the list goes on. We have Mad Max. There's like just such a long list of dystopian stories.

But then when you ask about, like what's the most hopeful thing you watched recently, they're like more of these like Will Smith like movies that are like about hope in a kind of happy, feel good way. But that's not the type of I mean, those are great, that they're good for society. But what I'm trying to get after and get stories written and submitted to the contest about our stories where hope is driving us to a

better reality in a it's not about feel good. It's about changing systems, changing norms, tackling white supremacy, patriarchy, and just going after these systems that are oppressing people so that other folks in folks that like and even myself just feel more liberated in this world. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from The Daily Show

with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from the Emmy Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun laws and take a closer look at how and why these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday. Tory, I love the

phrase hope as a practis my goodness. You should coin that and I when you said it, because it triggered for me this idea of our ancestors and activism and what it meant to, for instance, fight for the abolition

of slavery. At the time that it was beginning to be fought, you had to be hopeful of a future that you hadn't seen right, centuries centuries of terrorism, abuse, torture, and brutality, and your abolitionists were imagining a time that they were never going to necessarily live in, and that to me embodies the hope as as practis right as

somebody who is super political. You know, the framing of the future has always I think a lot of the times been by the opponents of that future, right, people who have said, oh, well, we can't spend money on clean energy, right because what about big oil and big coal. We can't you know, talk about the reality of science

and climate change because it will hurt people's feelings. I think that we've allowed people to drain us of that hopefulness, and we've kind of fallen into this dystopian narrative that says to us that the future is already written, right, and what you're doing, and what you're doing is saying, no, it does not have to be. And I think that that, you know, that of itself is a form of activism that I don't think that we talk about nearly enough.

That hopefulness isn't just about that I wish for and that I hope for, like we're blowing out candles, It really is in the doing of the thing. And so for you know, story for people who again have not seen their future and have not seen their path be written. Just just talk a bit more about the importance of us writing our own stories and ones that are framed

not about our deficit but in the face of abundance. Yeah, I would say that the way you framed it around like folks being like, you know, abolitionists, that's a really good example of folks that really had no clue if they were going to live, they would live in the world in which the one that they were dreaming of.

So you know that that's a good reference point. That's a good thing that I should even remember, like as when I'm talking about this, the thing that I also want to bring up is, so you before we started the show, you were talking about afrofuturism. And so when I was looking into who's hopeful in the feet, who's hopeful in this kind of way? Who are folks that are like oppressed but still looking at a hopeful future, I was looking at you know, disabled futurisms. I was

looking at afrofuturism, Latins futurism, Indigenous futurism. I didn't even know there was all these futurisms like until I started this project, and so I started to look into that and there was all these folks dreaming of like their version of Wakanda basically yes and right, and so I I that gave me hope, right, And so then I started to write the bones of this project in a

different frame. You know. When I first started, before I started diving into these other futurisms, I was, you know, looking at climate solutions and the place that I'm at Grist. We've fixed the lab that I'm in. We've always had like an idea of like turning stories from gloom and

doom to one of hope in you know, solutions. So that was there, but these other pieces bringing in threads that other folks have already paved the way for in the afrofuturist kind of vein where abundance is talked about, where the white gaze doesn't exist because it's not about like we're not centering people here, We're sending black and brown folks right and opening up that dream space. It was something I was working with um the Waconda Dream Lab.

That's a clique of black and brown creatives that really lean into visioning, and so I learned from them as well, and it was just so helpful to kind of just listen to the way they just talked about visioning and how it could you know. So I guess one background I want to give is that it was this was

life changing. I'll just lean into that. I used to be in policy healthcare policy, as a as a fundraiser, and so a lot of like I thought visioning was kind of a bunch of kind of you know, woo woo stuff, right, And it wasn't until I met with the Wakanda Dream Lab folks and they got me right around how powerful visioning can be by stepping outside of your immediate Like I was looking at goals as a fundraiser, I really wanted, you know, let we have to raise

money like now this quarter. It's really important because we need to get folks who don't have medicaid medicaid like, so, you know, let's push that policy, let's advocate, let's raise the money we need. We had short timelines, and they got me to think outside of the scope of, you know, something immediate and look at something that was one hundred and eighty years from now just as an exercise, and I saw how powerful it was for me and my team.

And then that's how we kind of pulled that into the climate fiction world because we were like, oh, now we can allow people to dream of abundance in a way that has nothing to do with like what's going on with right now, so they could world build and sketch out the kind of world they actually want and deserved. Yeah,

I can't express to you one. I had just eighteen ideas pop into my head of things that I want to do with you all and lift up and lift up these different laps and the and the people that are visioning behind them, like yourself when you said the importance of visioning and like the stepping outside of the

immediate scope. And I think about the fact that politics, you know, and I used to work in policy as well, environmental policy many you know, many moons ago, and thinking about what it means to pause to dream, what it means to actually pause to think about the one, the what can be, the what is possible instead of the what is? And how like that is that is where like the future. It's like the future is developed in

that in between space. And I think that we allow for the negativity and the toxicity of where we are to move us outside of that dream. And if I really think about it, you know, that is what it means to live in an authoritarian state, is like, it's the lack of dreaming, right, It's the it's the lack of having the possibility of the thing. Right. And if you if your future is already carved out, then what am I? What am I working towards? What am I

dreaming towards? And so I just I love I love that you said that, and I love that that context that that you put it in. UM last question for you is you know, what are your hopes story for you know, for this, for this project, but also just in general of again existing inside of the climate reality that people are just waking up to. Right these are

things that have been warned up. We're experiencing things that have been warned about for thirty and forty years right and now and now they are happening at rapid pace.

So what is your what is your you know, your your your idea of the future for um Imagine twenty two hundred, but also in context of what we are seeing and living through now, Yeah, I would say that more and more people, as you said, are waking up to the fact that this is like an urgent issue, and so as people become more awake to this issue. What we want to do is be able to reach them all with the right information because there's a lot

of misinformation out there. So Grist as a magazine, as a media news organization has does that on the news side of things, and so in our lab we were thinking about we always think about storytelling and using storytelling to reach people who just aren't interested in the news or aren't interested in the type of news that's like more fact based, science based. And so we've been on the fixed side of things, telling stories from a human interest point of view with the climate solutions involved in

that the person is involved in. So typically you'll see on the fixed side of things, we tell a story about the climate solution and then you'll learn a lot about the person. So there's people who really like that style of storytelling, so we leaned in on that, but then we realize there's still a whole other segment of people who get their orientation through fiction and through these

kind of stories. So that's when we start an experiment to say, well, let's let's drop up this climate fiction initiative and see if you know, we can reach more people. And what we've seen is that there's a growth for this, Like so the in the first year we had one seventy five thousand, two hundred thousand people depending on the numbers visit the site, and so that's you know, a

lot of people reading stories around hopeful futures, abundance. We have a lot of The interesting thing I would say about Imagine twenty two hundred is that, yes, these are client by stories, but there are also stories about care work, about respecting our elders, about the importance of caring for our elders in their final days, about reparations, about giving

land back to indigenous folks. So sometimes the climate is like just one of the many issues in the story, and we want to introduce people to these ideas as well and have them find values in value to the stories because they feel at home with these stories. They're like, oh, finally someone's doing these kind of stories, and so we're

creating a platform for people to do that. And I guess I'll answer the question around what I hope for the project is we would love to take There's some folks called the Good Energy Folks or Project, and they've been pushing Hollywood to do more stories that have a climate at the center of the story, as a plot or even adjacent. They found in their most recent reports that less than four percent of all of the TV that we stream and movies that we watch have anything

to do with climate. And so that's like, this is one of the biggest stories, is one of the biggest things we're going to go through in our lifetime, yet it's not being depicted on our one of our most popularized way of consuming stories, which is through Hollywood. So I hope at some point that we could take some of these stories off the page and turn them into either an animation project or live actors. We're exploring those right now with a couple different partners, and you could

see in a few years. Things move really slow in Hollywood, so you could see in a few years some of these jump off the page and beyond the screen. I mean,

I'm excited to see it and watch. And as I mentioned briefly to you before we started recording m if IF, I had not been introduced to African futurism and afrofuturism at the beginning of twenty twenty by a good friend of mine that said, Danielle, you need to get out of what is happening and just just go to another world for a bit, just just dream for a bit. And so she introduced me to Nadi okafor and I ripped through I think every single thing that she had

had written. Um, I've been turned onto NK Jemison. Obviously before that, I had, you know, had already read Octavia Butler's Parable series, which I base a lot of things that are happening right now around. But it was just, you know, being introduced to powerful black women that were writing the future was like even even still in some of their stories, obviously it is dystopian, but they were still I still felt seen and I still felt that we were going to be a part of the future.

So it was, you know, it was it was honestly eye opening and life changing for me. So I hope that the stories that you're bringing do the same for for folks as well. Tori, thank you so much for making the time to join woke APP. I hope that you come back. Yeah, thanks for having me. Really appreciate this conversation and want to follow your journey. And yeah, thank you, thank you. That is it today for me. Friends on woke app. As always, power to the people.

And to all the people power get woke and stay woke as fun. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from the Emmy Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun laws and take a closer look at how and why

these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday.