Eloísa Alena Lewis Of New Climate Culture: 5 Things We Must Do To Inspire The Next Generation About Sustainability And The Environment
An Interview With Martita Mestey
Learn what products and building materials are carcinogenic and walk away from these goods. Find alternatives made from simple, non-toxic earthly ingredients. Cultivate, forage for, and harvest those materials.
As a part of my series about what we must do to inspire the next generation about sustainability and the environment, I had the pleasure of interviewing Eloisa Lewis.
Eloisa Lewis is a climate scientist and founder of New Climate Culture, a leading climate science think tank focused on delivering climate solutions to communities and industries across the globe while influencing international policy goals. Through her early academic work as an artificial intelligence researcher, she has expanded her academic and research experience to include the most effective forms of carbon sequestration in reimagining the built environment.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?
I grew up within a wealthy liberal sort of democratic-socialist household in Scottsdale, Arizona. I lived on the edge of Scottsdale against a huge mountain preserve with sacred mountains. As I got older, I spent time living in urban centers, farms, homesteads, artist residencies, eco-villages, communes, schoolies, tiny houses, squats, tents, co-working spaces, and anywhere else that was fertile grounds for sharing my earth-based spirituality as an ally to the global soil, water, and atmospheric systems.
Was there an “aha moment” or a specific trigger that made you decide you wanted to become a scientist or environmental leader? Can you share that story with us?
I was studying a summer semester at Harvard after my freshman year at university. I went on scholarship. I was crying in the library while I looked at people on the sidewalk who would never have access to the privilege that going to Harvard would grant a person. I felt the income and racial inequality deeply, and I prayed that god would show me a new way of being. As soon as I returned to Arizona after that semester, I met Lisa Rainer — my first permaculture mentor.
She blew my mind! This little Northern Arizona local forest fairy who was growing all her own food, making bread, and crafting all the time. She told me about regenerative sciences and I found myself subconsciously changed. It was just a matter of time before I realized that permaculture had sown a seed in my heart and stomach. I mean, you eat GOOD when you eat permaculture because it’s about cultivating your own community’s food — birds and bees and all kinds of so-called pests included — and there’s just nothing healthier than that kind of accountability and intention.
Is there a lesson you can take out of your own story that can exemplify what can inspire a young person to become an environmental leader?
Start geeking out on permaculture and indigenous land stewardship. If you can work with these biological systems to promote them, you’re a climate hero.
The environmental leaders that I hang out with a lot are those people who are becoming more and more familiar with their local ecologies and dependent upon them. They forage and cultivate all their own food. They process their own food and food for their community. They save seeds. They trade seeds, bulbs, fruit trees, breads, meats, soil, tools, and all kinds of things in the permaculture economy!
It’s really a self-sustaining economy that requires minimal inputs and produces environmentally critical yields. A real wellness economy. A real freedom economy, free from even what people consider to be money currencies. Those are kind of my closest friends. I think we are the types who would do this stuff even if people didn’t pay us to… We just love life.
Here’s a few more ways to share your gifts with your friends and communities:
- Go to permaculture design meetups, share your gifts with your community. Get your own hands in the soil in the backyard or the churchyard. Community gardens are such magical places where everything is delicious and the people are friendly. The best way to teach is to lead by example, so invite your loved ones along to explore too!
- Be active in local meetings that can shut down the development or legality of oil, coal, and nuclear economies, pipeline development, fracking, mines, monoculture (monocrop) farms, and offshore oil rigs! Why? Because these things are the source of most GreenHouse Gases (GHGs) that poison our biodiversity which is absolutely essential to our survival and leeches so much poison into our freshwater. The fossil fuel economy is not a viable option for land management. The monoculture farms are not a viable option for land management. Reckless and overly optimistic investors must be halted and redirected to viable options. We have created the opportunity for the world to learn what these viable options are, a big focus of New Climate Culture. I would rather have mandates by cities that we have to use less electricity than worry about where my energy is coming from in this mass-extinction-based environmental crisis.
- Help make producing and selling plastic (which is a toxic petrochemical) in your local city or nation-state illegal. Plastic is often sold inside of sneaky and dangerous places like candles.
- Advocate for Permaculture-approved pesticides on community agriculture only, no petrochemical-based herbicides, pesticides, etc. It must become illegal immediately!
- Create co-ops and shared spaces for your community to gather and share permaculture designs and participate in the permaculture economy.
Can you tell our readers about the initiatives that you or your company are taking to address climate change or sustainability? Can you give an example for each?
Our company is in the process of becoming carbon neutral, and eventually carbon negative, which would mean that the amount of carbon that my cohorts and I are using to work on New Climate Culture projects will be less than the amount we absorb into our carbon sinks within the next two years. We are well on our way already.
In addition to our regular speaking programs, workshops, and design-consulting we have our School of ECOnomics. This is where we teach students, professors, principals, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, investors and others how to create climate-smart economies.
We also offer scholarships to our ECOnomics school to leaders of marginalized communities. You can apply by sending an inquiry to: community@newclimateculture.com.
Can you share 3 lifestyle tweaks that the general public can do to be more sustainable or help address the climate change challenge?
Absolutely! Change is nature’s delight. Let’s evolve together, and quickly. It can be quite fun and enlightening to fully open up to the possibility of healing our ecologies.
- Immediately invest in things like local farm cooperatives, local CSAs, local permaculture projects, climate smart banks, electric cars, electric motorcycles, electric bikes, electrical transit, alternative energy transit, public transit, bicycle, carbon offset apps like Klima, and ride share.
- Consume consciously, but better yet produce and recycle consciously. Recycle not only all this garbage being mindlessly created but also think about converting to harvesting your own water (e.g. rain water harvesting, install a well) as well as harvesting your own materials for your business from more sustainable and less invasive, exploitative sources.
- Stop with the fast fashion. Buy artisanal, thrifted, handmade… anything but fast fashion! So many clothes these days are made of plastic and create microplastics that leeches petro-chemicals into your community and body. There are a lot of beautiful and sacred materials made from organic sources. We can adorn and celebrate ourselves better, with more intention, slowness, and care.
Here is the main question of our interview: The youth-led climate strikes of September 2019 showed an impressive degree of activism and initiative by young people on behalf of climate change. This was great, and there is still plenty that needs to be done. In your opinion, what are 5 things parents should do to inspire the next generation to become engaged in sustainability and the environmental movement? Please give a story or an example for each.
- Take your kids into the wilderness and not just for outdoor sports, please! Definitely find a local foraging expert leading their own forays and join up. You gotta kind of dig for these people but it’s totally possible. You can also use websites like www.fallingfruit.org to forage locally.
- Learn what products and building materials are carcinogenic and walk away from these goods. Find alternatives made from simple, non-toxic earthly ingredients. Cultivate, forage for, and harvest those materials.
- If you’re living and working in a space that isn’t climate adapted, the chances are that you’re living in a refugee situation! Your house is probably made of toxic chemicals, your workplace probably is too, and your local government and universities are probably still experimenting with dusting the Earth’s surface with the most lethal chemicals known to human consciousness. Short and long term exposure does have a real effect! I’m not joking here. Shut down the cycles of poison and opt out. We will build anew, and that’s exactly what my company, and our partner companies, teach people how to do.
- Practice a craft with your child teaching them how to create art, work with clay, occupy their own time, use their imagination, and remain playful! Playfulness and innocence are the heart of creativity. We need independent thinkers and a lot of creativity to imagine a new world… and then build it. But it’s a beautiful, extraordinary process.
- A vegan (fresh, preservative free, nontoxic foods, whole foods) lifestyle or a “qualitarian” (free range eggs, free range organic meats, wild meats, simple ingredients, whole foods) lifestyle is most ideal for the climate and it’s the biggest impact that the average person — or in this case, a family — can have.
How would you articulate how a business can become more profitable by being more sustainable and more environmentally conscious? Can you share a story or example?
A business can become more profitable because they are cutting costs across all the most vital sectors, creating more flourishing local economies in the process. Your business will actually contribute to the wellbeing of all the species of life around itself. You’ll be producing the renewable materials you need to source for your own projects, or narrowing that gap in production line management, so you’ll be ever more self-sustaining. A community that profits, profits most in creating a legacy that people can actually trust and engage with for quality goods. By providing that, your profits are inevitable and as more people jump ship from the old systems, they’ll have no better option than what’s next. And what’s next is us.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I am really grateful to my friend Kendal Brownsberger. She is a soul sister of mine who kept me safe when it was early on in my journey as an environmental activist. After I graduated from university, we had all these great phone conversations all the time that just made me feel so loved and supported and seen. It was one of those times in life where I wasn’t getting that anywhere else, from anyone else. Kendal just believed in me. I love her so much and she deserves all the best from this world.
You are a person of great influence and doing some great things for the world! If you could inspire a movement that would bring the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I really believe that I can demonstrate a path to world peace via abundantly shared and cultivated renewable resources. Consider that the military industrial complex is one of the largest global polluters with the largest impact on the death of our global ecosystems.
To that I say: Peace Worldwide.
Do you have a favorite life lesson quote? Can you tell us how that was relevant to you in your own life?
My favorite quote is probably: “Loss is nothing but change, and change is nature’s delight.” This was by Marcus Aereulius.
This comes from my early days as an epistemology researcher. I enjoy this quote so much because I have personally benefited a lot from stoicism in my life. I find that I hold on to very little, if anything at all, in the flow of things. Like, you have to find joy in the chaos of things to understand the chaos at all. Acceptance is actually the name of our ever-changing game.
It’s especially in our acceptance of unpredictable natural cycles and what they teach us that we can actually observe viable answers to solve our relationship with them. We cannot find peace in our resistance to the rule of wilderness, physics, thermodynamics, and biochemistry. It is simply untenable.
What is the best way for people to follow you on social media?
My company is called @newclimateculture on Instagram. My personal handle is @nomadsoulful. I’m on Twitter too, for the first time, as @buddhaculture.
This was so inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Eloísa Alena Lewis Of New Climate Culture: 5 Things We Must Do To Inspire The Next Generation About… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.