(00:01): 

Well, I'm in over my head. No one told me I'm trying to keep my footprints small, harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet oh will someone please save me? Trying to save the planet oh will someone please save me? 

(00:25): 

Welcome to In Over My Head, I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is Beth Osnes. Beth is an associate professor of theatre environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Professor Osnes is a theatre and performance studies artist and scholar who is active in applied performance and creative climate communication. She's co-director of Inside the Greenhouse and co-founded the former mothers Acting Up and Speak a nonprofit for the vocal empowerment of young women and girls. Beth is the author of several books including Performance for Resilience, engaging Youth on Energy and Climate Through Music Movement and Theater, and Her Life and Work. Were featured in the award-winning documentary Mother Caring for 7 billion. Professor Osnes has presented at the World Renewable Energy Congress, the World Renewable Energy Forum, and the United Nations Earth Summit. Welcome to In Over My Head Beth. 

(01:10): 

Welcome. Thank you so much. 

(01:12): 

So in thinking about how we change minds when it comes to the climate crisis, the idea of storytelling has come up and it's something I want to explore since I think it's not enough to just listen to the science. We need to engage people on a deeper level. Your work as an artist revolves around climate communication. So I'm looking forward to discussing this topic with you. To start, I think it might be helpful to get a brief overview of your art because there's a lot there. How do you describe your work to someone you've just met? 

(01:34): 

I guess I'd describe my work as youth focused and it's not because I think that like, oh, isn't it nice to work with young people? It's because I actually find them interesting, malleable worthy, good collaborators who are not so inured in the status quo that they're actually willing to play and get physical. And so youth focused and I would say that my work is all embodied. I'm really interested in the physical embodied, gestural movement part of our being, being part of the climate conversation. I think that we impact and experience the environment through our bodies and that we a, bring our bodies to these considerations of climate change. I also feel like I describe my work as I use a lot of weird costumes. A lot of spectacle, a lot of public procession. I like to have fun, I like to share joy. That's the goal of a lot of these performances. 

(02:29): 

I want people to feel good. I think that when people feel good, they'll come back to something again and again. And if climate engagement feels good, then you've got a sustained commitment. And I also just like being outside. I don't, I don't wanna be inside all the time. So that ends up defining my works just through personal preference and that pretty much sums it up. And I think a lot of it is story-based, but some of it's in little things that people might not identify as traditional stories. They might be more visual communications that would be a little bit more funny or zany or something like that, that maybe expands what we think of in terms of storytelling. 

(03:02): 

Obviously working with youth is a big part of your focus and even within that you work with some non-performers as well. Is that correct? 

(03:10): 

Oh, definitely. What I do is usually called applied performance or Applied Theatre. And what it's really characterized by is, you know, usually performing these things in non-traditional spaces, working with folks who don't really identify as performers and also that having the, the, what it's about, what it's centered on is being identified by the community itself and it's based on their concerns. I think that's really key to what I do. 

(03:32): 

Tell me about some of the projects you've been involved with. 

(03:35): 

So one of the things that I've been involved with that we're gearing up for now for Earth Day, which is always April 22nd, and we have a climate comedy show that we do. We have this whole initiative that happens around Earth Day. Max Boykoff, who is a environmental studies professor here at the University of Colorado, has been one of my best buddies and collaborators and co-publish in this area of climate comedy. And we've had the pleasure of partnering with Chuck Nice, who is a professional comedian actor who resides in New York City and is on Star talk with Neil Degrass Tyson. And so he's really invested in this climate crisis and using comedy as a approach to start to engage peoples, to start to communicate top climate solutions. 

(04:20): 

Yeah, and that definitely was a theme in your work when I was looking at your website comedy as a way to get across climate information. So why is comedy an important tool when we're talking about climate? 

(04:31): 

So it's interesting, I'm a theatre professor so you know, I, I've looked at the history of what comedy has meant in different societies over the ages and there's a lot of examples. If you go back to the classical Greek era, theatre itself was really part of democracy. It was that public setting in which people came together to take on important issues. And comedy has long history in many contents of many countries of taking on contemporary current pressing issues. If you look at Lysistrata, which is a very famous play about women going on a sex strike in order to get the men to call peace a truce because the war that was raging was disrupting their lives on the domestic front, they were desperate to bring peace and they take over the Acropolis and they take all the resources that would be funding the war and they declare a sex strike. 

(05:22): 

And it's a ridiculous premise, but the content and the material is very serious indeed ending a war. So I think comedy has that ability to engage people in these popular issues and these current pressing issues in a way that also lights up the brain. You know, it, it splits down the middle, the idea of the single perspective, you know, and I think that's what gets us into a lot of trouble when we think there's only one way to look at something from one dominant position that has historically always told the story of history or culture. And when we start to be able to split that and actually expose some of the hypocrisy and to offer up different viewpoints, it can cause this kind of split of delight and discovery in your brain that we laugh at, that we find funny and it's actually achieving a lot. 

(06:11): 

It's not just a joke, a throwaway joke, it's actually opening up our brains and it's like doing it with delight, which is super different and it's a full embodied experience. Authentic laughter is an involuntary physical response to a stimuli and that's profound. You put people together who all have an involuntary physical response that is audible and they feed off each other and they're, you know, that's a powerful social phenomena that can be occurring. One thing I find too is we do research with our students and we teach a class, max Boykoff and I and Patrick Chandler has been a part of it too, where we teach a class called Creative Climate Communication and it's always in the spring. So it always culminates in these poor environmental studies students who don't know what's coming, they sign up for the class and they get told that they're gonna have to perform standup or sketch comedy in front of a live audience by the end of the semester on Earth Day. 

(07:06): 

And they're like, ah, it's too late to drop the class, what am I gonna do? And they do it and we support them and they're so proud and they have these exceptional experiences coming together and doing it. So we've really been able to support young people in actually being able to produce climate comedy in a way that really, it has so many cascading co-benefits. What we've been able to show is that they feel sustained in their commitment because they've associated positive emotions with engagement with climate change. They have renewed hope, but a kind of a constructive hope that's based in action and without hope, it doesn't make sense to act. And they're also able to just process the negative emotions that are kind of crippling this younger generation because there's so much climate anxiety and grief and hopelessness around why would I even procreate? Why would I have a family if they're just gonna suffer? 

(07:55): 

This is what I hear students saying in, its heartbreaking and it's not wrong and you have to engage with them in some way. And the other thing that was super interesting was when we did research on our students, we realized that our students grew up getting information on contemporary issues through comedic sources. So for them to be expressing themselves on climate through comedy is not weird. It's not a stretch. More than half of them expect to get their news from comedic sources, late night television, you know, the Trevor Noah, the John Oliver, you know, all these shows that are combining comedy with really deeply researched contemporary information and comedy can get into the nuanced nuances of the issues. So it's not just like dumping science and info. 

(08:42): 

I like that also that you're involving environmental science students who are, again, non-performers. Do you do any sort of coaching with them as to how to perform well? 

(08:51): 

Oh yeah. We start the semester right off the bat, getting them into their bodies, having fun playing, getting comfortable, being uncomfortable, you know, that takes a lot of support. We have to scaffold that experience because I mean there are a lot of people who would rather have death of spouse than public speaking as performers, the hardest type of performance is comedy. You get immediate feedback whether you are successful or not, you could be doing Greek tragedy and like nobody's gonna know if you're successful or not. They're like bored. But like it's not expected that anybody would be laughing. But if you tell a joke and no one laughs, you got some pretty immediate feedback. The thing that our students have experienced is they are like getting the biggest highs when they get a response. And it's been so fun to watch students struggle. There was one student, a male student who was just great and he was so earnest and he was trying and he did all the work and we talk about what makes things funny, exaggeration, timing, you know, scatological, sexual innuendo, all these things are just, they are reliably funny. And you know, by golly he got to it at the end where he was funny and it was a, it was work. You think, oh, people either have it or they don't. It's gotta be light, you can't work at comedy. It's like this magic a little thing that appears. It's like no, comedy is a product of hard work. Talk to any professional comedian. 

(10:03): 

And you've mentioned them doing like standup, right? And a lot of your work is live performance. And I'm wondering like how does that change compared to say a film when you are trying to impact an audience? 

(10:14): 

Well I think it's about connection. What they really start to feel and experience is the connection of communicating in real time, in real space coming together in community. And it was so funny cuz this last year when we did the class, we had the biggest turnout we ever had in terms of audience. And the audience was so loving and they were just like laughing their heads off and it was really great. And I said after the performance was over and we were, we still had a few classes left and I asked them, I said, why did we have such a good audience? Was it because I made you do invites during class previous to the event? Or is it because you felt good about it and actually asked your friends to come? And they said, and it was the latter, they said, no, I was actually proud of our work. I couldn't believe we were actually funny. You know, cuz the audience was made up of their people, their tribes, their their sororities or their friend group or their families or their, you know, their people. Bringing people together to like unite them above what divides them to celebrate that to to kind of crack open a bunch of things and look inside. That's where I really feel like some progress can be made. 

(11:15): 

Yeah, I think getting together and, and having a good laugh. I think it's, it's so easy to get into our heads and get academic and look at the science and the facts, but that doesn't convince people. Right. That's why I think, again, storytelling is so important. 

(11:28): 

Well, Max Boykoff is a, you know, a sociology, you know, brings a social science as perspective to the class and you look at the science, the social science on climate communication and there's a saying the deficit model is dead long lived. The deficit model, this idea that deficit, like people don't have enough information on climate, but if they did they'd totally align their actions to be, you know, against global warming. And that's just not true. You dump science on people and it doesn't move the needle. What you need to do is engage story. You know, like there's stories of like, what was that Korean movie that had the pig that was the genetically modified pig that - 

(12:02): 

Oh Yes, it was so sad- 

(12:03): 

-What was that called? I know it was beautiful and it made my daughter and I stop eating meat, you know, we didn't eat much but it like, it moved the needle. It resulted in behavior change, which in terms of communication is huge. You know, usually you'd think, oh maybe I could do some attitude change but to result in a narrative story, getting so deep into the heart and that's a place where we don't have defenses for that kind of messaging. We've got defenses built up barriers to information that we already have preexisting belief systems around, but comedy can sneak around and it can go to these emotive storytelling places where we're open and receptive and that's where I think we can start to really generate connections. 

(12:40): 

Yeah, absolutely. And and that film you referenced it was, you know, touching on not eating meat but it wasn't really talking about it directly. And I noticed like some of your work is more focused on let's talk about the climate, let's make it kind of present. Do you find a difference between those two ways of, of talking about it? 

(12:56): 

Well, it's just been fun. The recipe that we've kind of used that has been our secret sauce is when we've been creating these shows. We have our students who perform live comedy, but previous to them making their own pieces or kind of like concurrently they work with professional comedians in LA and New York. Last year we got five professional comedians from New York, five from LA and we had somebody who was producing the,. Scott Beaner was a professional comedian in LA producing a show, Chuck Nice did it in New York City. And we had our students teamed up like four students per professional comedian working with them. They identified a climate solution that was appropriate for that comedian. Like Johnny is a comedian who does a lot of scatological humor. So they did methane digesters with him, which is basically putting poop in a enclosed situation and allowing the bacteria to come in and generate methane which can then be used for gas for cooking. 

(13:45): 

So you know, they, they matched it up and then we had our students researching contemporary issues around that solution and feeding this to the professional comedian along with ideas for jokes. But then the comedians really worked with the students to create their own pieces. Then they come back via the zoom sphere to our students, get into a little working group in the breakout room and they bat it around, make sure it's scientifically accurate, make sure it's informed by all the best social sciences around effective climate communication. And then the professional comedians know how to make all that funny. There's a lot of efforts to try to get scientists to be funny and it's like, oh my god, good luck. There may be a few out there like Rollie Williams who are already funny, but good luck making a scientist funny starting from scratch. You know, go to the professional comedians who have been working this and honing this skill for a long period of time and they, they can take the content and they're adaptable with content. So we've had some really successful, we had Dr Game Show is a show that Manola Moreno and Joe Firestone do. They did a fantastic episode on climate change for Earth Day 2022. And it was so funny and they just took the content and ran with it with their already 10,000 subscribed listeners to their radio show. So, you know, it's like we're really working where people already have audiences and just inserting this content material. It's always, comedy is always about something. Why not climate? 

(15:06): 

With the professional comedians by chance? Like do you ever notice that maybe they've been influenced by the work that you've been doing? 

(15:13): 

Yeah, definitely. Nate Townson, New York comedian, he has just started including that material in his regular repertoire because it's good content. You know, comedians are always talking about topical issues that matter to people. He also is somebody who's like really great, he's like a climate activist who's been arrested. You know, it's like, yeah, that's street cred. So when we find these folks who we are starting to build relationships with, who really have these kind of long-term commitments like Chuck nice. It's really enriching and it's really rich to start really building up a movement of people who are getting engaged and invested in climate comedy. 

(15:48): 

And you also have a film portion, right? A film competition about climate comedy. 

(15:53): 

Yeah, that's open now if you go to inside the greenhouse.org, there is a, we've had, this is our eighth, I think this will be our eighth international climate comedy video competition. And we have three winners with prize money that we do every year. And we really get, I mean we could international submissions. I think two years ago a film from South Africa was awarded. We had 'em from Canada, the us you know, just all over the place. We've really had success with that and it really, what it creates is this kind of curated archive of all these really exceptional climate comedy videos. 

(16:28): 

Yeah. And I, and I watched a few of them, some of them are yeah, really, really sharp and really funny and it seems like, yeah, some are from professional performers, maybe some are again from non-performers. 

(16:38): 

A lot of this work too is really saying we don't have to just leave it up to the professionals. I think we can work for the professionals and they can model what really, you know, really impactful climate comedy looks like. But then working with our students, we've shown that we have a model that we can support people in creating it themselves and they can really have a lot of joy in having access to expression themselves, which I think is really empowering for people when they can start to generate that and have fun themselves. I did a workshop with the Wooster Polytechnic Institute engineers who were visiting Colorado and did a two-hour climate comedy workshop with them and they all created these comedic songs by the end in groups and they were delighted and they were like, this is so fun. We're focused on climate change in our engineering efforts and to find some levity, some lightness, some ability to process the heaviness of the issue in the, in the content. I think there's a lot of healing, a lot of coping, a lot of freedom and joy that can come from access to expression. 

(17:36): 

No, absolutely. And and do you feel like maybe it opens up new avenues of thinking about the topic as well? 

(17:41): 

Yeah, definitely. I think it does. I think it cracks open even looking at yourself, where are my places where I've got blind spots, where I have a single perspective that, that I'm just defending anybody who takes themselves too seriously is a target, a very happy target for satire. What you need is someone who takes themselves seriously and then you can have a heyday going at them. One of the things I write about in one of my articles is good-natured comedy. This idea that comedy that is good natured, it's good for nature, it's good for the environment, it's got pro-environmental messaging at its heart, but it's also good-natured. It's kind in intent. I'm interested in how many of our forms of comedy can further polarize us as a people, which we really don't need. We're already so polarized. So just doing climate comedy in and of itself is not necessarily a positive thing. If you've put backs further against the wall, if you've offended, if you've made people afraid or ashamed, that's when they do some of their worst behavior. So what are you doing? What are you really achieving with your comedy? If you're inspiring those kind of reactions and behaviors. 

(18:44): 

And do you find maybe like some of your students might start in that and maybe evolving?  

(18:48): 

Yeah. Well also I don't wanna, I don't wanna censor anybody like go at it. There is bad behavior out there that should be exposed and ridiculed and like that's, go for it. But know what you're doing. You know, consider what you're achieving, what is the intent and then what is the impact of what you're putting out there and what you're engaging in. So I don't wanna say any rules, like you have to do good natured comedy, but let's diversify what we think we can choose as forms of comedy. Let's be mindful, let's look all the way down to the full reception and likely impact of our climate comedy. And there's things that we can do that, like there's humor, which is like, you know, like Mark Twain said, God must have loved the common man. He made so many of them. And it's like a thing where it's a little bit of a poke at all of us, but it makes us feel more unified than divided. At the end of the day, there are forms of humor that can expose social truths that actually foster a feeling of kind of like, oh yeah, a re a, a shared recognition that can be heartwarming and kinda like, yeah, that's how it's going. 

(19:50): 

One project that comes to mind that is comedic is your musical Shine. Tell me about that. 

(19:55): 

So Shine is a musical for youth engagement in climate and energy. It was started when the a hundred Resilient Cities initiative through the Rockefeller Foundation was inviting a hundred cities from around the world to engage in writing a plan for their city for resilience. And of course resilience is tied into climate change and the human dimension of it and the physical dimensions of the kind of threats that really challenge each different area of the world. And so I wanted to really ensure that youth had a voice and a, a way to contribute to these plans for resilience. So I created this mini musical as a tool that I toured two cities across the world that were engaged in this a hundred Resilient Cities initiative. And what I really learned was that students love getting dressed up into these costumes of these green mor suits with a sash that is a leafy sash where they impersonate ancient plants and then they have these big capes where they are a trilobyte or some kind of a lizard from the Carboniferous period and they physically show you what it looks like for the ancient plants and animals to die. 

(20:59): 

And they do this dramatic death scene, which they love and which is funny. And they get covered by this big cloth tarp of rock and mud and they're compressed underneath and underneath their little wiggling underneath and they're all taking off their outer costumes and they come rolling out and all dressed in black to show that they're coal. They are, you know, a fossil fuel that has been formed over these millions of years under that compression. We're doing this to start to show that yeah, fossil fuels can be recreated, they can be generated again, but you know, who has this kind of time on their hands millions and millions of years. So they start to understand what it took to create these fossil fuels. And then to look at, we get to the point where one of the characters who is embodied a kind of an anthropomorphic character of Foss who represents fossil fuels and he's fast and he's got all these funny numbers and he is showing that like you could, you start to see in this dramatic story that overuse of fossil fuels during the industrial age up until the current day is releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere and it's having an impact which is felt through climate change. 

(22:06): 

And we end at this kind of climactic moment where the fabric of community is ripped through by a storm, by this climate change induced by over consumption of fossil fuels. And it stops and they freeze and they say, this is where we are now. What is the future story that we want to tell? And this is like act two where the young people get together and they're supported in creating their own dramatizations of appropriate and like actionable top solutions to climate in their area that are appropriate to where they live. And then they start to create these skits and then when it's performed for their own community, these youth solutions, they enact that first part that's already been told, that's been written by myself, choreographed by Arthur Frederick somebody with the National Dance Institute in New York City composed by Tom Wasinger, who's a Grammy award-winning musician. 

(22:56): 

And then you get to that point where they author the solutions and those are funny and ingenious and just silly and sometimes preposterous, but that's okay. And then there's a final number at the end where it's shine, shine, shine, shine, shine, shine. And there's this great big musical number at the end where balloons go up and they're all dancing and they've got these synchronized movements that they've created together and the whole audience goes home humming that last tune cuz it just gets in your head. And there's this kind of community celebration, but there's also this supporting of youth voices contributing their solutions and they do it by engaging their full bodies and investing themselves physically and creatively. 

(23:38): 

Oh that's wonderful. And and so if I'm understanding that correctly, act one was always the same and then, so act two was different depending on, on the community you were in. Yep. 

(23:45): 

The youth in each area authored act two. 

(23:48): 

Did you see common themes in Act two that each community was bringing out or was it different every time? 

(23:54): 

Well, it was different in different places. Like when we were in Meloe, South Africa, one of the solutions that was really brought forward was women's ability to stay in school and access to feminine protection. We partner with Project Drawdown in this work and Project Drawdown is an organization that really listed the top climate solutions and did the research in a really holistic way to kind of stack them up and say which ones are gonna have the largest amount of impact. And there's 80, I think 80 something solutions that they identify. And the second top solution is health and education, which is kind of a euphemism for watching on population stabilization through getting women access to education and family planning. And you know, it's too politically charged to say that, but that's a lot of what it's geared towards. And so access to feminine protection, you think, how can that be funny? 

(24:41): 

But it is, it's great. We did this song where they were trying to understand the female reproductive system and so we had it marked out the female anatomy of the fallopian tubes and the uterus on the floor using masking tape. And then we had kids going around from the ovaries to the other and we did this dance and this chant to usher the egg down the fallopian tubes and it went, Ooh, ah, ah, ooh ooh, ovulation. Ooh ah, ah. And you know, it's like, it's a silly song and you're learning about, you know, the female reproductive system, but you can make comedy out of anything. Just give fun and get silly with it. 

(25:16): 

Absolutely. And and I love that it's relates so much to the, the local community, right? Cause that might be an issue in one place but might not be as big of an issue in other places potentially. So I, I love that you're doing that with that show. 

(25:27): 

I mean, yeah, like I don't think that in Boulder, Colorado, that lack of access to female protection is keeping girls from going to school while they're menstruating. You know, like that's just not an issue. But what are the issues here? We have floods, we have fires, we have droughts. So what are the things that matter to us? And when you start talking to kids and engaging them, there was one kid, we had a flood in 2014 here in Boulder, Colorado that was declared a national emergency and there was a child that had a, you know, kind of a family setting that was a little bit like she was falling through the cracks at one point during the flood, she was literally in a tree waiting for one of her adults to come and pick her up from school. Like she was literally in a tree to get away from the deluge of water coming down. So these kids have survived things and thrived through things, you know, like there's climate emergencies that have happened in these kids' communities that they have very real stories from and scars from and trauma around. So young people have stories to tell. 

(26:23): 

Absolutely. It seems like a lot of your work involves telling those authentic stories. And so what is the reaction to the local audience when they hear those stories coming from the children in that community? 

(26:34): 

Yeah, so I think that's really powerful because any community, their youth represents their future. They're the ones who are gonna inherit the world that we create, the world that we leave, what kind of ancestors do we want to be? And they're also the ones who can look at us and point a finger and say, wait a minute, you're having a fossil fuel party having all the good snacks, eating all the good food and you want us to just clean up the party. That's really what you're doing. And it's hard not to hear truth from, it's like intergenerational environmental justice. You start giving kids information and just saying, hold your adults accountable. Like what is your family doing? What is your impact? There was one skit that was about the family was gonna go on an expensive vacation that was gonna cost a whole lot of money and emit a whole lot of carbon flying somewhere very exciting and different. 

(27:24): 

And they, the kids said, Hey, how about instead we use that same money and invest in some really good bikes that we can then use all around the city and then we'll go on a bike trip locally that is like a camping bike trip and we used all those same resources to invest in a different type of transportation that's actually gonna have more of a positive carbon footprint. So, you know, like you start seeing young people identifying these things and it's just as much fun. In fact, you know, at the end of the day you still got the bike , you know, you didn't go to Hawaii, but you get to keep the bike. 

(27:56): 

Yeah. And I think it's really important cuz you know, as usually as adults back to comedy for instance, I think about improvisation and, and being in your head and, and I feel like adults so much are just like, this is what's happening. These are the facts and this is what we need to do about it. But maybe they don't always see alternative solutions. And I think that's something that's very powerful about young people that they can, like the comedy cut through some of those issues and really just get to the heart of it. 

(28:18): 

You know, they can also address false arguments. There's a lot of misinformation that can come in all or nothing thinking. It's like, well, you know, if you want me to go to a plant-based diet then I can't ever have meat. They did a whole skit of like debunking this idea of all or nothing thinking, saying no, just transition. Start eating less or only one night a week or start with one night a week without eating meat and having a plant-based diet. Like, you know, like, so they really can debunk some of the things that people use as false arguments against the introduction of some kind of behavior change that might, that would have so many benefits. And they also can do it in really funny ways. Like there's one where somebody did managed grazing and that's the idea that you integrate the use of livestock of cows in the same place where you would be growing fields, but you just, you alternate. 

(29:05): 

And then you find that there's positive benefits in having cattle on fields that are gonna be used for agriculture because they poop and they leave their manure, but then their footprints dig it in. That's like doing the work of getting that poop into the soil and they love any kind of skit that involves poop. You know, scatological humor is reliable, it's just keeps giving. It's also anytime you get people into their body, they tend to experience humor. There's one really clever solution that one group came up with where they took a tarp and it was probably like, you know, like a five by seven tarp and they said, okay, we're gonna have two male identifying folks get on this and two female identifying folks get on this. And we're gonna say, women, you can't contribute at all to the solution. And what your challenge is, you all need to turn this tarp so that the other side is facing upwards, but you all have to be on the tarp at all times. 

(29:55): 

So you can't touch the floor. You have to do that. And they try to do it the first time without half of the population being able to contribute ideas and they usually fail and then they do it again and then they do it again. And once we incrementally let the women contribute more, then everybody can figure it out. It's kinda like you fold it over everybody's steps on it, then you tuck out the bottom part and then you can do it. You actually can flip a tarp with everybody's feet not touching the ground if you do it in a really certain way. And it usually takes a group a while to all contribute to figuring it out. So they're like just doing physical, a physical challenge that's just hard and that gets you into weird positions almost like, you know, twister. And that just brings up humor because you're in your body. That's a location for humor. Anytime the body has to do something ridiculous, that's a source of humor. 

(30:41): 

So are these adults that you've done this exercise with or are they children or both? 

(30:44): 

We've done it with college-aged high school, but it works with adults. You know, I really love doing intergenerational work. I often find that when young people are included, they kind of give a permission to play parents or you know, guardians will engage with kids and get on the floor and do physical stuff, get on that playground and swing and get upside down because they're with a young person. So I feel like that intergenerational aspect of it is really helpful to get everybody to like expand a little bit. We need to expand the range of our behavior in order to solve this climate crisis. In order for us to survive and thrive in an equitable way, we need to change our behavior, we need to expand our expressive range and we need to be capable of doing that. And it needs to feel good and be fun, otherwise we won't do it. We always seek out what's fun and what feels good. So we've gotta make the solutions feel good for folks to gravitate towards them and to repeat them and to come back to them again and again. 

(31:43): 

You know, you've been doing this work quite a long time. Have you noticed kind of a shift in people's attitudes or narratives or maybe anything positive that's coming out of the work that you've been doing? 

(31:52): 

What I've noticed is that there's greater loads of anxiety that young people are carrying. And I think that my dedication is towards giving young people creating frameworks for creative experiences and performance-based methods that offer up access to expression. Because what I find is when I work with environmental studies majors who are seniors and they're about to go out and be our next generation of changemakers and their hearts are nearly broken on the ground and we're gonna send them out to be the solution, I can't solve everything. I can't give them the answers, I can't, you know, do that. But when I give them access to expression that lifts them, that buoy them, that gives them some access to positive, positive emotion, to constructive hope, to sustained engagement. And these are things that we've done as research with our students to really say, make evidence that these are evidence-based practices that really supporting access to expression is top solution for reversing global warming. 

(32:57): 

No, absolutely and I think it's great that you're combining academic rigorous research with theater and with performance and with regular people, not just artists. Yeah, I think that's really, really fascinating. One thing I was curious about, one of your projects was the green suits, you're out in communities as well. So you talk about those non-traditional performance spaces. Yeah. Like is that part of your art as well? Is that reaction from bystanders or, or just the community? 

(33:23): 

Yes. And that's really a micro thing where I like it when people themselves can be the creators of content. People want that now. They don't wanna be passive recipients to already boxed up packaged entertainment. They wanna be the TikTok maker, they wanna be the ones on social media creating content. And this green suits is really simply just letting people have access to a green morph suit that completely covers the entire body. It has a sash, a green leafy sash that goes over the shoulder and they're asked to just start physicalizing and acting green solutions, making literal the idea of greening. You know, green used to be an adjective, a color, and now it's a verb. You know, you can green something and that's a transitive verb that's happened in our lifetimes in the last decade or two that we've started to use this word as a verb. 

(34:09): 

And then I have all these different ways it's been disseminated. We partnered with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and did a exhibit of a Boulder Valley school district initiative where all the kids got access to green suits, did photographs of them, showing ways in which sustainability is being enacted in Boulder, Colorado. And they did photographs, they put 'em in, we had a whole contest, we had professional people judging them. Jim Balog was one of our judges from Chasing Ice. And we exhibited the top solutions at a National Center for Atmospheric Research. And they have, you know, 90,000 plus visitors a year. So really inverting these spaces of social power and getting youth voices, youth representation, youth authorship present and offering the solutions that are embedded with joy and delight. That's what the work is trying to do. And right now we have actually, yesterday it launched, we're doing these bus ads on the sides of buses in Boulder, Colorado that engage a positive environmental message and feature a figure in a green suit. Because research shows us that if a human figure is present in a communication, it draws the eye in. And there's an amount of visual comedy in the green suit because it's curious, you know, and it kind of shows that the greening is a physical, literal, it's not really a metaphor anymore. This person's really green and they're doing green behavior. 

(35:28): 

Oh, it's cool. It sounds like a really interesting initiative. 

(35:31): 

It's really fun. It makes me happy. 

(35:33): 

. Yeah. Well, I could just keep talking on and on and on, but you, you know, this show is about empowering citizens to take action on the climate crisis. We've been talking about storytelling and comedy and so what can people do to make sure that's part of the solution? 

(35:46): 

If you are interested in trying to get young people engaged and supporting them in some of these expressive, creative experiences inside the greenhouse.org, we have a tab that says how to act up. There's Drawdown Act Up, it shows a lot of different activities you can do with young people that are embodied, but we also created a website called enacting climate.org, and that's where Patrick Chandler and I worked with a whole team of CU students and fifth graders to take the top climate solutions identified by Project Drawdown and make them accessible to a fifth-grade reading level. And we did the visuals, the charts, so they're all more engaging for kids, and they feature photographs of young people using performance-based visual, funny methods to start communicating top climate solutions. So that's a resource that's open source. Anybody can use it at enactingclimate.org and the Shine curriculum, that mini musical, there is a curriculum there as well that is all open source that Patrick Chandler and I co-created with a team of teachers at St. Elementary in Golden, Colorado. 

(36:45): 

So we really have a lot of resources that we're just putting out and anybody can contact me, beth. osnes@colorado.edu for support, encouragement, whatever you need. And think of educators, you know, think of people who are doing community engagement, maybe in faith communities or other kinds of organizations and say, Hey, there's all this open source stuff that you can use to engage young people. I'm putting the rest of my life on the belief that engaging young people, investing in them as the communicators of a sustainable, equitable, survivable, survivable future is the best bet. I think they're the ones that we're gonna listen to because it's their future. I think we wanna leave a legacy of hope, of possibilities, of clean air and clean water, and the ability to thrive and have babies. We wanna be grandparents. We want them to believe that there's a reason to live and that there's hope at the end of the day. So I think investing in young people and getting some of these open source tools that are available at insidethegreenhouse.org or enactingclimate.org can be a great start. Let's do this. Let's get young people inspiring our communities to act. 

(37:51): 

Perfect. Yeah. Well, that's very helpful advice. Yeah, this has been a very enjoyable conversation, Beth. Thanks so much for coming on the show. 

(37:58): 

Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

(38:02): 

Well, that was my conversation with Beth. I love how she's using storytelling, especially comedy, to change that narrative around climate change and addressing the crisis and allowing people to express their authentic voices. I think that was so key to her work and to making change. Will, that's all for me. I'm Michael Bartz. Here's the feeling a little less in of our heads when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see you again soon. In Over My Head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz original theme song by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch with us, email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com. Special thanks to Telus STORYHIVE for making this show possible. 

(38:38): 

I'm trying to save the planet, oh will someone please save me?