When you think of climate action, does the word “fun” come to mind? Most people don’t think of climate action as pleasurable, joyful, or relaxing. But this week on Climate Magic, we consider why the work of building a positive future should be fun. My guest is Lil Milagro Henriquez, founder of the Mycelium Youth Network, and creator of a board game called Mycelial Realms. If you are wondering how to meet young people where they are, if you want to understand how games can save the world, if you avoid climate action because you don’t feel knowledgeable enough, or if you’re wondering how to apply social-emotional learning to kids who are worried about climate change, then this is a great episode for you.
Show notes:
- Adrienne maree brown’s book, Emergent Strategy
- Mycelium Youth Network’s Website
- Mycelium IG
- Lil'sLinkedIn profile
- Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation
- “Geeks vs. Climate Change” article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-024-03747-w
- A PBS show about play and climate change, on which Mycelium Youth Network, Lil Milagro, and Mycelium Realms are featured: https://www.pbs.org/video/rpg-62wbpv/
Transcript:
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Feels like it's impossible to think of changing the world, cause everything feels so large and so difficult. And so games allow us to really lean into that space of dreaming a better world, of future-making a world that we really want to see, and then taking the steps to be able to make that happen.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Welcome to Climate Magic, a show where we explore the messy human side of climate politics. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, an author and professor of Environmental Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. When you think of climate action, does the word fun come to mind? Probably not. Most people don't think of climate action as pleasurable, fun, or relaxing. Indeed, the entire concept of climate anxiety suggests that climate change by its very nature produces anxiety, not chill vibes in most people. Do we need to make climate action a little more fun? My guests this week would say, absolutely, Lil Milagro Henriquez, founder of the Mycelium Youth Network, loves gaming. She loves speculative fiction, and she loves having fun. She's a self-described sci-fi nerd, and she wants climate solutions to be fun and accessible to young people. And she has a whole theory of change about how gaming would be a great climate solution. Bringing in the best research in climate psychology, the game she's designing is going to be fun, even meditative, or in the parlance of game culture that I just learned, cozy. After years of working with youth and even more years loving gaming, she has come to realize that this is an untapped leverage point of change. But before we get to gaming and fun, we talk about her organization, Mycelium Youth Network, an Oakland based nonprofit she started in 2017. Mycelium Youth Network integrates traditional ecological knowledge, ancestral inheritance, climate solutions, and social emotional learning to empower youth to imagine and then build a future that they would desire, not just one that they fear. We talk about how adults can create conditions for young people to process and express their many forms of grief and anxiety, not just the ones about climate, and how important it is for young people and all of us to imagine ourselves as change makers and the future as full of possibility, not apocalyptic. Lil Milagro is a movement leader and activist of Nahuat Pipil descent with 20 plus years of experience decolonizing education, bringing about environmental justice and food sovereignty and union democracy, and organizing labor. If you are wondering how to meet young people where they are, if you want to understand how games can save the world, if you avoid climate action because you feel like you don't have skills or expertise, or if you're wondering how to make social emotional learning more applicable to a wider variety of students who worry about climate change, then this is a great episode for you. Let's dive in. Welcome to the show, Lil Milagro. How are you doing?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Good, good, good. Second cup of coffee, so feeling great.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Oh, good. Well, I'm just so excited to have you on the show, Climate Magic, and I think we're going to go all over the place today, and I hope that you get to say all the things you want to say, but I want to start with you are the founder of the Mycelium Youth Network. And I learned about the Mycelium Youth Network when you almost, I believe when you first started it. And I remember thinking, This is filling a niche, this is filling a gap. This is doing stuff that's really radical and cutting edge and interesting. And I got on your email Listserv, and I started paying real attention to what you were doing. And it's been fun to watch the development of the organization. And I'm curious if you could maybe explain for our audiences: What is the Mycelium Youth Network? And, you know, how you've evolved to meet these needs that you saw, that you organized it for? So why do you love this concept of mycelium and how does it capture what you feel the organization is doing in the world?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yeah, that's a great question. And I really came to it in a backwardly place where, you know, I started Mycelium in 2017 with this group of fifth graders that I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with, and the wildfires were happening across California. And I remember having, like, conversations with students around like, you know, what do you think about what's happening? And they just expressed this incredible fear and anxiety for the moment that we were living through and how adults weren't talking to them. And that was, you know, one of our original students, Khalil, who graduated high school recently, which is wild, but said something like, "Yeah, this is really scary, but what's scarier is that adults aren't talking to us about it." We're not. So it almost felt like they were being gaslit, right, in terms of what was happening in the world and how they were experiencing it. And so when I was trying to think about what that meant, because my background actually isn't in climate at all, it's in labor and immigrant rights. I am Nahuat Pipil as a person, and so I have my own spiritual and cultural practices and ceremonial practices, but in terms of an actual like, professional work background, there wasn't anything there. And so I was like, Well, let's if I start something, I don't know what this is going to be, but if I start something, will you join me? And so we started my Mycelium from the place of, like, these group of fifth graders saying, yes, we will give up our lunch and recess one day a week in order to, like, learn about climate resilience. And we were all thinking about a name of what we wanted to call it. And so I'd bring up all of these ideas about things that I thought were really cool. They were like, No, no, no, they vetoed everything. And then I had watched a video. My partner, Danny, was like, well, have you heard about the Mysolium network? And I was like, no? And we went home and we watched a documentary about mycelium and about what it does and how there's all of these different types of mycelial networks and all these types of mushrooms that can do different things in the soil. It could do, you know, detoxification, remediation, but they just grew, and they spoke to each other, and they spoke to trees, and it spoke to plants. And it was this underground network that I thought was so incredibly beautiful to think through. And, and I brought that back to the youth themselves, to this group of fifth graders, and they're like, that's it. That's the name. Mausoleum Youth Network. And so it took it was actually, I think, like six or seven months into starting Mycelium that we officially named it Mycelium Youth Network. And I appreciate the sense that, like when there were trees that were like baby trees at the Mycelium Network would provide resources and support, or if there were trees that were poisonous, that they would pull resources away so it wouldn't affect other areas. And I thought, Well, how amazing would it be if we can take the same concept, and how do we need to look to our more than human kin for answers and to say, like, well, what if we actually did this with people? What if, like, young people across the Bay Area because, you know, we're in the Bay Area, what if they were supporting each other like this? What if they were, you know, recognizing the things that each group of young people can do uniquely at their sites? Like, what are the things and resources that they can support? And I really just, like, loved that as a concept. And I also love that it was underground, because I think that there's something to the idea that here's the above ground stuff, and here's how young people are being told these really are being ignored when they're bringing up climate issues, but, like, on the underground, they're organizing themselves and they're sharing resources themselves. And so they know what is going to keep them alive and what is going to give them hope or, you know, feel like moments of resilience. And how do we lean into that? And I'm so grateful that those students did not veto that idea because if they had vetoed my Mycelium Youth Network, I didn't have that much left, but they accepted it, so I was really glad for that.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: I want to pull apart a couple of things you just said. The underground part. I love what you just said about how there's a story, this dominant story about what's happening with young people that's out there, including, for example, Jonathan Hight's book, The Anxious Generation and how all this frenzy over social media destroying young people and worries about them not wanting to have children ever in their future, and the stories about climate anxiety and youth being so prominent. And all kinds of stuff, right? And the idea that that is the mainstream story of adults speaking about young people. But really, what's happening with young people on the ground is kind of underground, not on the ground. It's underground. And it's in that sense, kind of less visible, but supremely powerful, right? It determines what's happening above ground. It is responding to what's happening above ground. It's in this relationship with both the visible and the invisible. So I just wanted to, you know, pull apart that and ask you a little bit more about what are you seeing? What's the story that's not being told? What's the invisible story about young people? Aside from them organizing, and not just believing everything, and following in step with what every adult is saying about them, what's their story? What are you seeing among them?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: I think there is definitely a piece around, like, youth anxiety because it's just so prevalent when we talk to young people. But I think the part that often gets lost in that is that some of the greatest movements of the last 100, 120 years in our country have really been started from young people. And whether that's like the Civil Rights movement, whether that is like Standing Rock, March for our Lives, there's so many great movements that have started because young people refuse to accept this dominant narrative that change happens so, like, slowly and incrementally, and you just have to accept it. Like, you know, life is just unfair, right? It's a consistent message that I think adults tell kids-- kids are like, Act, but it doesn't have to be. Like, why? Why is it unfair? And they consistently push and push and push. As a parent, sometimes the pushing is good. As, like, a social movement, it is incredibly important because it actually has us challenge what our own preconceived notions of what can be possible in the world that we want to be able to build. And so that's, like, the piece that I think is really important. And people often say like, Well, we're doing this for young people. I was like, No, actually, young people are doing this for all of us. Because when young people are pushing and asking us to question, like, the basis of our assumptions about why the world is the way it is and why it should or could or shouldn't change, they're actually pushing us to think in a liberatory fashion. And I think that there's something beautiful in that. And then we see like there's been studies that have shown that, like, young people are like five or 6-years-old are actually asking justice questions. They're about equity. They're like, Wait, why am I getting something and my friend is not? And then as we grow up and as we age into ourselves and we normalize the world around us, we're like, that's just the way it is. But they're like, actually, it doesn't have to be. And so if we stay to that place of, like, actually leaning into the places that young people are asking us to lean into, it actually benefits all of us, not even just their climate anxiety, because a lot of adults have climate anxiety. A lot of adults feel there's that moment of, like, dissonance that happens in our world where we're like, this isn't how it should be. But I have a job and I have to take care of my kids, and I have to do all of these things. And so we push it to the back of our minds. And I think that the way that young people have been able to and consistently push us to say, actually, no, it doesn't have to be this way, I think is really, really important. And they also just push us to, like, dream and imagine something different, which I think is exactly what we need in this moment right now.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Oh, I love it. I think people often are paternalistic about young people, right? That they're this kind of the famous pedagogy theorist, liberatory pedagogy theorist Paulo Freire, and his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed talks about the banking model of education, right? That young people are kind of these blank slates, you know, empty of information and knowledge. They have no wisdom of their own, and so they go to the adults to get filled up and they go to schools to get filled up of information and go, you know, get the deposits out of the bank. And I think what you're describing as a real that sort of deficit model of their knowledge is really to our great detriment. You're not just saying it's to their great detriment. It's to everybody's great detriment, right? They have something, they have a superpower. And I know that a lot of young people might balk when they hear that and say, No, that makes me feel like I'm supposed to save the world. And I don't-- I resent that responsibility. Yeah. But, I mean, there's a sense of, like, at least it's a reversal or revision of the narrative that they don't have anything to offer and that they should be invisible, right? To go to that invisible notion of youth not having any power, youth not having any good ideas about anything, youth not having any wisdom about how the world works. You're really trying to correct that or they're trying to correct that, and you're just trying to create some structure to do that at scale, right?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yes, 100%. And also trying to think about what is our role as adults? What is our responsibility as adults to both create an environment where young people cannot just be like a check the box inspirational moment, you know, and then you move on. But, like, what is our responsibility as adults to really support and guide the process and to, like, create that structure that they need? One of the things we do at Mycelium is we provide internship stipends for young people across, like, I think, like 70%, 80% of our programming. And so we're like, Actually, you should be paid for your thoughts, and you should be paid to be able to dream and imagine a different world because that actually has intrinsic value. And so it's like the idea of our responsibility as adults is to support and guide young people, but also, to also challenge the systems and to push back against our places where we have privilege and to ask a difficult question so that young people don't always have to. When young people are ready, or when they want to be able to create a container for them to speak powerfully, truth to power, and to be able to say the things that they need to say, but that we're alongside them doing that together, right? At Mycelium, we also think about our work intergenerationally. And so it's not just, like, how are we just a youth serving organization, but, like, what does it mean for us to be all in community? And what is the role of each particular group at different stages of our development in different stages of our lives, to be able to support young people Um, so it's something that we've been thinking a lot through as, like, our own responsibility as adults, to be able to push things forward. So it's not that young people should feel, because they shouldn't feel, although they do feel very often, that sense of responsibility to, like, I need to, like, save the world, and that could be exhausting. It is exhausting. It could be exhausting for anybody. And so we never want to create an environment where there's so much pressure on young people because that's another form of adultism, right? To be able to have to create the change that they want to see all the time. But we should listen to them and create spaces for them to have power as they create the world that they want to see.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: I wanted to pull out one other thing that you said in your first response, which is that you didn't have a background in climate. And I think this is a really important detail. A lot of people who avoid doing climate-based journalism, climate-based education, educators in the K through 12, all kinds of people kind of stay away from climate discussions or climate leadership or thinking, Okay, we need to bring climate across the curriculum, or we need to bring climate resilience into this community area, or into my church, or whatever it is. In large part because they think, well, I'm not an expert. I don't have expertise in that. There's this weird gatekeeping dimension to the climate discourse that makes people not participate, which is really unfortunate. And one of the things I care a lot about is to say to people, everybody needs to get on board, and you do not have to have a ton of scientific expertise to get it on board in all of these myriad ways. We need expertise in all the kinds. We need art expertise, we need imagination expertise, we need education expertise, we need parenting expertise, all kinds of expertise matters here. And I noticed what you said as you said that, was this beautiful comment about how you might not have climate expertise in that particular category, but you do bring all of your tradition and wisdom from your own inheritance. And I would like to ask you to maybe share a little bit more about that because I would love to think that other people might hear you and model that themselves. Oh, I might not be a climate expert in that particular dominant way. But like Lil Milagro, I actually do inherit all this climate expertise. Can you speak a little bit about what you meant by that and what it is for you?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: My background is in labor and immigrant rights and at a professional level, and I am Nahuat Pipil, and I've gone to, like, ceremonies and been in spaces with, like, my own community back in Cuzcatlan, which is now known as El Salvador and, you know, have that as knowledge. And I think that for me, like, the space to, like, choose climate was really in that moment of recognizing that, like, young people, particularly this group of fifth graders that I was working with, felt so abandoned. And they felt like there was such a need. And at the time, I was working as the director of organizing at a school, Rose's and Concrete Community School. I was trying to get my PhD in systematic theology, and I was trying to figure out, like, what is my space in the world? What is my place? And hearing young people both expressing that as a feeling and then also hearing or seeing myself and witnessing myself the effects of the wildfire smoke. And it was at a time where students couldn't even and adults couldn't leave, like, classrooms or couldn't go outdoors without, like, you know, getting nosebleeds or headaches from the smoke. And I thought like, this is-- and it was a moment for me that just kind of clicked where I was like, this is what I want to dedicate the rest of my life to. I have no idea how to start. But I have, you know, I have been an organizer. I know what it means to, like, meet people where they're at. I've been in ceremony. I've been in community. I know what it means to be connecting or trying to connect with our, like, more than, like, human kin, with, like, our plan and animal relatives. And so I really want to try this. It's actually been interesting because I think when I think we don't have expertise in climate, well, everyone actually has because everyone is now living through the climate failing or living through like this feeling of wildfires and, not even feeling, this experience of, like, wildfires and floods and drought. And so we're all becoming experts in what it means to live through this as an environment. But we're never asked, well, what do you want to imagine on top of that? And I think it becomes until we get paralyzed by that, Oh, I don't know enough, and we don't think about, like, what do I want to imagine? Because there's no space in our larger society to create that imagination and possibility. And exactly like you're saying, we do need, like, people that are creating art. You know, we need people that are creating games. We need people that are creating education. We need people to lean into the feeling of, I'm deeply uncomfortable. I don't know what to do, but what can be on the other side if I do create something, or if I do try something? And I think that the idea of this, like, expertise around solutions it feels I'm kind of always a little bit anti that because I'm like, if you can't I've been in spaces, like, really big spaces where, you know, some of the top minds in climate thinking about solutions. And I'm like, if you can't explain it to me as a layperson, then all of your knowledge doesn't matter. Because how are we getting this knowledge out to the general public? How are you making it accessible and knowledgeable to me as somebody that doesn't have that much experience, so that I can take it and make it accessible to young people who really need it? And so we need to, like, interrupt this idea of, like, climate experts or, like, you know, where the knowledge itself is really inaccessible because I've been to the conferences, and it is generally the same people talking to the same group of people about solutions. And I'm like, but none of it matters because we're just talking in this vacuum. And we actually need to be getting out solutions that are present because there's so many climate solutions that are present, that we could be enacting now, but we're not. And so I think it's important for people, the general public, for people in, like, all kinds of spaces to say, like, why isn't this knowledge accessible to me? What's stopping it from getting to me? And how can I participate in receiving this knowledge and then in, like, mobilizing around this knowledge? And I think that that's for me, like, the big thing that I think about. And now I have, like, much more knowledge. Mycelium is about to turn ten. But it's still like, make it really, really accessible to me. Like, I'm not trying to get a like-- I don't need to-- I shouldn't have to have a, like, master's or a PhD in, like, any kind of climate knowledge for me to be able to be at an event, because I have my own experience of going through the drought and going through the wildfires, of talking to young people that are anxious, of being in community. And knowledge should be education. The point of education should be to prepare young people for the world that they're going to inherit. And the point of knowledge or climate solutions should be for the general public to be able to enact, not just a small group of people who are themselves, like, you know, running themselves ragged because they feel all this responsibility to be able to solve it themselves rather than bringing it out to the general public.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: And sharing the work of it.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yes. Sharing the work of it!
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everything you're saying, yes, I get it. And I also it's making me think I'm really intrigued by your kind of, I don't want to call it anti-solutionism, but you're saying solutionism can only go so far if you don't have a different theory of change. And the theory of change you're suggesting is it's got to be mobilized at the local levels by regular people who aren't experts, period. And that probably should start with youth, right? I mean, this is kind of your theory of change. And you said something too about, um, you know, that you don't have the knowledge of the masters in solutions, and you don't have the engineering. But what you then described that you do have was a lot of what I consider part of the solution package, right? I mean, you have organizing, you know how to meet people where they are. And then also all your background with, you know, the labor organizing, Roses in Concrete, all of the stuff that you're doing working with young people. To me, ceremony, all of the things that you described, seem to me like the package of expertise that's also we need to broaden the umbrella of what we count as expertise, rather than to say, that's expertise over there, and then it has to be accessible to the lay public. But rather, what I think you're offering or what I hear you offering is saying, actually the lay public, including me, has all this other kinds of skill that the expertise will be in a vacuum unless the other types of skills and expertise help implement it. I wanted to shift a little bit here to asking you about social emotional learning. Which I notice is on your website and is relevant to this show, which is really about the emotional side of climate politics and climate justice. So one of the missions of the Mycelium Youth Network is to reduce climate anxiety through social and emotional learning is actually on your website. But I've also read some critiques of social emotional learning being built on kind of Western ideas or colonial ideas of mental health and psychology. And certainly the largest critique I hear, and even students bulk at this, which is this kind of capitalist underpinning of social emotional learning that just is about getting students to be more adjusted to being producers in the economy, you know? And, you know, sort of like this Krishnamurti quote that says something like, you know, there's no such thing as being healthy in an unhealthy system. And the idea of getting social emotional learning to acclimate to an unhealthy system. Do we want that? Right? So students are even pushing back on that. And also Indigenous critiques of social emotional learning being kind of too individualistic and framing the solutions around the individual rather than a collective structural solution. I'm curious, you know, can you talk a little bit about what Mycelium Youth Network, and what you mean, by social emotional learning and how are you trying to kind of revise that definition in the work that you're doing?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: The reason we highlight well, we have a different way that we're thinking through social emotional learning. And for us, it's like, how are we supporting the emotional experience of students learning about issues around climate change? And there is an emotional there's, like, extreme grief that is present. There's anger that's present. And so it's not just the, okay, let's talk about climate solutions or let's talk about climate resilience. We're actually not also tending to the, like, somatic bodily experience and the emotions that come behind it. And it's not to even say, like, Okay, like, let's meditate for 10 minutes and then jump into a project, you know, or, like, let's figure out what you know-- I think it's really for us about, like, how do we sit with that? How do we sit with the climate grief? How do we sit with the climate anger? How do we create space for joy within this? How do we create space for community? We pull a lot from, like, different, you know, like I'm Nahuat Pipil, so, you know, we pull from different traditions to think about, like, you know, we use, like, talking circle, for example, a lot. We'll just have students. Sometimes we'll go into the lesson, sometimes we won't go into a lesson. Sometimes we just sit with the experience of what students are feeling. And sometimes that's tied to climate, but that could also be tied to police violence. That could also be tied to, like, ICE. That could also be tied to, you know, so many other things that are happening in our, like, larger society right now. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to say, like, your emotional experience of both of what is happening in our society as well as what we're learning about is just as valid as you receiving knowledge around what are climate solutions around it. And so how do we sit with that whole experience? Because if we if we're not tending to that, like, emotional space, then... It's yeah, like, it's-- I don't know. It just feels like we're asking students to divide themselves up into all of these different pieces. And we want to be able to tend to that space of, like, what is that experience? And sometimes it's just grief. Sometimes it's like, "Oh, actually, this is what happened, um, to, like, my, you know, little brother" or, like, you know, "This is the experience of racism I just experienced at school." And we're like, "Yes," because we are whole beings in this world. And so how do we tend to the whole being part of ourselves as we're creating a space to also think through, like, climate resilience, and youth leadership, and youth engagement. And so it's like tending to that whole body experience and then using the tools that we have to be able to think through what that could look like. And not just-- Like I said, not just the anger, not just the grief, but also, like, what does it look like when we come together with in joy? What does it look like when we create art together? What does it look like when we're attentive to one another and our own emotional needs as a community or as a group of students? For us, it's like, how do we recognize and then move? How do we both, like, recognize that we're whole beings and then create whole spaces for young people to be able to bring all of that to the table. And it's not like social SEL, as it's, like, done in schools, but it's more like, what does it mean to be a whole person in this space?
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Mm. I can imagine I'm thinking of all the educators in my own life who tell me, "I don't want to be a therapist" and I-- "What if I cause trauma? And what if things get messy? And it's going to... I don't know how to hold that container when things are really raw and difficult." What is the you know, what is your advice there for social-- bringing kind of this version of emotional intelligence, if you want to call it that or I don't know what you want to it. Social emotional learning is what you call on your website. But attending to the multidimensional human experience of all of these difficulties... you know, does one have to be a therapist? Are we asking too much of educators with young people? What's your response to that, do you think?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think it's... I don't think it's asking educators, and we don't ask our educators to be therapists. We just say, what does it mean-
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, of course.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: to, like, hold space for young people? And sometimes, like, for example, I'm going to go back to, like, when we started Mycelium. Sometimes it's just saying, like, "I hear you. This is really hard. I feel this too." And that expression of being recognized and seen, even if we don't have the answers. And I think as adults, we're like, we have to have the answers, right? Because then if we don't have the answers, then, you know, people aren't gonna trust us anymore. The young people are going to be like, what do you know?
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: We lose cred.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: You lose credibility, but sometimes it's just the experience of being like, "I feel you. This is incredibly hard." And not like in a flippant, like, I feel you this is hard. Let's move on. But like, "What do you need in this moment?" And I think that's really, really important because I think that work with young people is such sacred work and that youth need to feel connected to an adult and to be able to feel seen, to feel validated, and just having that as a moment. And even if it's, maybe it's not you as a particular educator, maybe it's like, "Oh, don't... I can't connect to this young person because I don't have that relationship. Let let me figure out who else can support them in this." And how do you lean into the community so that it's not that every one person has to be everything to every single student, but sometimes it's like, "Okay, well, I don't have an answer, but let me go figure it out." Or, you know, "I hear you, I feel you. Let me go see who I can get you support in this." And just leaning into that larger community space, I think is really, really important and seeing what are the resources that we have as a community to support one another. But I do think it's really critical and crucial to hold space for young people. All of it around climate grief and climate anxiety.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: You know, I was thinking to myself, what's stopping educators? What's stopping the adults in their lives from doing this? And it's partly what you just said about losing credibility, but I was sort of doing a little inner work as you were speaking myself. Like, what stops me? And I realized that I feel a profound sense of anxiety and panic if I feel like my students don't leave the classroom happy. Like, I'm personally failing them if they are not existentially cool with their lives. And I think of my job as to make them so, right? And so when they are not and things are a mess and things are difficult, I have this fawning, solving, fixing impulse from my own causes and conditions that make me want to fix it, fix 'em. And so if I can't fix 'em, I get a negative feeling, and oftentimes it actually makes me resentful at them, which is I'm just thinking this through that I know I've had this, like, recognition of my job isn't to make them happy. You know, it's okay if they come away unhappy. But because of the model of education that's made it a kind of consumer product, right, five stars on Yelp or whatever, I have this feeling of, they're supposed to be a happy customer, what have I done wrong? It's so deep that capitalism is so deep in me or whatever you want to call it, that I think I need to do my own. I think educators in general, a lot of people probably feel that way, that sense of losing credibility and trust if you don't know all the answers, that sense of, I don't really want to stop in the middle of the day and go deep. It's too much. What if I trigger somebody and they get mad at me? And what if they're not happy at the end of all this if I failed, you know? And so there's so many reasons why that we all probably could do our own exploration for, you know, our aversion to going into difficult spaces and feelings with young people and with anybody, really. So thank you thank you for that little moment of therapy. Okay.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Well, the one thing,.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Okay.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: One thing I will add is that I do think that our education system,.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, please.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Particularly the K 12 systems, are not designed for educators to stop. Right?
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: No, yeah.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: There's so much content that you have to get through. And so, Mycelium is uniquely positioned because I mean, we both operate during the school day, but we also operate after school, and we move at the pace of our relationships, and we're moving at the pace of, like, where young people are at emotionally. And we have the privilege to be able to do that. And I think that our educational systems are not created to provide space for people to stop and to think and to have deeper conversations And so it becomes-- And for me, it's also it's not just an individual, like, how do educators, like, do this and do all of their lesson planning? I think it's more of like, what are the structural conditions that are created so that we have to blaze through, like, curriculum and content to be able to get to a solution. And yeah, I think also the piece around... yeah, like, happiness, I think it's a big one. It's something I actually think about as a parent a lot. I have two kids, and, you know, me and my husband were talking about this the other day, like, you know, a week or so ago, and we were talking about, like, "Well, it's not--" We're sitting with that uncomfortability of, like, it's not our job to make our kids, like, happy all the time. It's like, our job to, you know, create experiences for them that could support them and, like, learning and growing and have the difficult conversations that they need to have with us. And you know, yeah, we were just talking about this in terms of, like, getting our, for example, like, we're wanting to go to Alcatraz for the sunrise ceremony on Indigenous Peoples' Day, and we're like, "They're gonna be so cranky." We're like, "Well, it's not our job to make them happy. This is important. This is an important moment for them." And so we've just been, like, going back and forth around, what does that mean? A parents and as individuals. But so we've been thinking about this at yeah, at Mycelium. It's like, how do we just create containers? But we are-- Like I said, we do have the ability to the privilege to be able to move at our own pace, but I do think that it's necessary for schools as a whole to create more spaces for young people to be able to process and to create space and curriculum to make that happen, which is incredibly hard right now with all the cuts that are happening in education. But it is a structural issue that is failing our students.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, thank you for pointing that out. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with Lil Milagro Henriquez, founder of the Mycelium Youth Network. I wanted to ask you about games. You love gaming. Tell us about this. What do games do for you and, you know, what do you love about them? How did you figure out, you know, this sort of shift from thinking of it as, like, a guilty pleasure that you did as a hobby that maybe was distracting you from the real work of fixing the problems in the world? How did you decide, "Ah, aha, these are connected"? How can we use gaming as part of the fixing the world stuff? Where was that sort of aha moment for you? And what are you doing with gaming now?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yeah. Oh, I'm excited about this question. So I do love games. I'm a self identified nerd, sci-fi fantasy nerd. And, I mean, it's not just games. I think it's I mean, it's games, but it's also, you know, looking at speculative fiction. It's looking at, like, how are we re-imagining the world? And I've played games, man, since the original Nintendo-- I'm an elder millennial system and remembered how just that joy of being able to, like, be in another space and in another world. I'm still a gamer now. I play both board games and video games and VR games now. And so I think there's something amazing that happens in our brains. There's this incredible book called Reality is Broken, and it's looking at the nature of games and how games allow us to dream really, really big and what it allows us to imagine and how it brings people together. So very contrary to the idea of, like, you know, being in your parents' basement playing a video game, although I did do that through my high school years. And Mycelium originated from a place of games. I was playing, you know, I was running Dungeons and Dragons games with this group of fifth graders. And it was this imaginative space where I would take adventures and what's called, like, homebrew them. So you change them around a little bit and then see what happens. And I was really fascinated by the idea of, like, well, what happens if we take a scenario like wildfires and we create a D&D game around that. And what will students, what will young people, like, dream and imagine if the rules or the boundaries of this world weren't there? And seeing the ways that they came up with these incredibly imaginative solutions and seeing the ways that, like, when, you know, you had students that were creating their characters, there was a student who created this, like, a 7.5 foot tall, eight foot tall dragon born warrior. And whenever she would play in character, like, her voice just got so big and she was so commanding. And she's like, I love being, like, this version of myself. And so it also allows you to try out different versions of yourself in a way that, like, removes the stress or the "I need to get it right"-ness of the world sometimes or how we practice our identity. And so, seeing the ways that she would, like, lean into this, not just her, but, like others would, like, lean into, I want to try out this person now, and I want to be this different version of myself. And so it just freed up imagination around what can be possible. And you can also I mean, there's so much you can do. And the game world sometimes makes more sense than real world because real world can be confusing and chaotic, and there's things that we feel really powerless around. But when you're playing a game, whether that's a video game or a board game, you are in a action oriented space, right? You're seeing yourself as a change maker. And there was a great study that came out in Yale. I think it's like "Nerds against the environment" or something. "Nerds against climate" that came out that was saying that, like, video gamers are more likely to take action on the environment than non-gamers. And by about 10% to 15%. And yes, and the majority of people in the United States play video games. I think it's close to Oh, God. Like 60%. Like, I can get you the statistic later, but it's....
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: I'll find them. I'll find them and put them in the show notes, they're good. These are good. This is really good. Keep going.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: And so I think that there's something about it. Like, gamers are primed to think of themselves as change makers. We are changing the world when we play a game. And I love that idea. And I've been thinking recently more and more about... how are we future-making the world that we want? Because the future, as it's being written for us, is a contested zone. And by that I mean that we are being given a future of, like, climate chaos, of wealth inequity, of disparity, and that feels inevitable. And it's not. Nothing is set in stone. And so we're just being fed this like, this is the way it is, and you have no power to change it. And that's where, you know, the importance of, like, youth imagination comes in, but that's where also games come in because we can say, what is the world that we want to dream and imagine? Because if we can't imagine it, then how are we supposed to build it? And for a lot of us, myself included, at times, like, it feels like it's impossible to think of changing the world because everything feels so large and so difficult. And so games allow us to really lean into that space of dreaming a better world, a future-making a world that we really want to see, and then taking the steps to be able to make that happen. That article, "nerds against the environment," I think is what it's called. I am so, so, so lucky that I was able to, like, meet and then really connect with Marina Soros, who is the co-creator of our game. And she has just so much knowledge around, like, climate change and gaming. And we started thinking together, like, "Well, what if we created something that was a game, that was showing-- that was future-making, right?" That was saying, "What is the world that we want to build?" And so we are in the beginning stages, the planning stages of creating Mycelial Realms, which is a cozy video game, and cozy games are games that are meant for relaxation. So like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, like, you're fishing, you're farming. And we're saying, like, let's take this cozy game, and let's have a cozy game that's looking at climate solutions, right? So in the game, you start off at a seaport town that's, like, very similar to San Francisco. There was recently a big flood and you have to rebuild. And so you're putting into place in the game solutions that are actually present currently for climate change to prepare for the next big thing, but you're also you're doing it in a cozy game that's meant to be meditative and relaxing. And so we're trying to say, like, well, what happens if we can actually make climate solutions and the practice of climate solutions in a game environment relaxing. What does that do to our brain so that we're not just thinking through climate... You know, we're just feeling climate anxiety and like I have to do something, I have to do something. I have to fix it. But we're doing it from the place of, like, actually all of the activities are meant to be relaxing. It's pulling from traditional ecological knowledge in terms of how we're thinking about, for example, farming, using the three sisters model of farming, which is when you plant corn, squash, and beans together. You know, we're just like layering this and normalizing this as a reality so that people can be like, Well, yeah, well, why can't we do this in real life? Of course we can do this in real life. Because we have, again, climate solutions. That are being, you know, that are in this, like, far away space, but we're saying, actually, let's normalize those climate solutions and, like, let's have people actually play through them so that they think, "Well, I can do this." Because there are things that people can do, and games open up that possibility of being able to dream and imagine those solutions.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: I wanted to just quote from an article about Mycelial Realms this game you're developing. Just so people are familiar, one of the things that drives me a little bit crazy about games and various stuff and TV, kids stuff that my kids consume is sometimes they're super ecologically incorrect. I mean, I love Dora the Explorer, but could Dora the Explorer have done such a great job of ecological education and just done some corrections or the ecology? So I have all these moments of ecological theory about kids media that they're consuming. But on the contrary, Mycelial Realms is not going to do this. It is quote, in the article about it describes it, "It's designed to foster environmental literacy based on next generation science standards." Whoo. Yay. "Reduce climate anxiety through social emotional learning." That's what you just described and "Promote collective action among young people." That's the radical justice component. It says, "The game is rooted in traditional ecological knowledge, TEK and fosters opportunities for youth to use gameplay to connect with their lived environment." Okay, getting them back to connecting with nature right there, meeting youth where they are in digital spaces. I just think that is so fascinating and just radical. Once again, when I first discovered Mycelium Network, I was like, that's radical. And then this I'm reading this paragraph, and I'm thinking, that's radical. So just, "What!? " blowing my mind. I'm so impressed. I'm so excited. You have this whole tapping in. You just described it so beautifully. This kind of what literary scholars call prefigurative politics. This kind of you cannot build the thing if you don't imagine it first, this role of the imagination, you're fun-i-fying it with play, which is the psychological part and the social emotional learning and the kind of antidote to climate anxiety. Building a sense of agency and that you are already a change maker and the games would train us already into thinking of ourselves as change makers is just so like, one of the probably the most important or lowest hanging fruit, biggest thing you can do to reduce climate anxiety, right? I mean, like, do I have agency individually? And then the kind of really critical part of that to kind of combat the individualism aspect of all of this stuff is that, you know, doing it in community, that you point out and that we often think of digital spaces as further isolating people from each other, further isolating young people from reality, further isolating young people from nature. But really, this is you're turning all that stuff on its head, and I just want to go, Whoa, blowing my mind. I love it.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yay!
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Do you want to say anything more about that? Do you want to say anything more about the game? How are we going to get access to this game? I mean, when is it going to be done? And what are you doing with it?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yes. And, no, I think that the piece around the digital space is really interesting because I think that it is a very common and it's very common, right? Like, around, like, digital space and, like, how connected are young people to screens, how connected all of us are to our screens? Young people get a lot of flak for being, you know, connected to their screens, and I'm like, actually, adults are incredibly connected to our screens.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: I'm more. I'm worse than my kids. I'm worse than my kids. It's really I think we need to talk about that more.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yes. No, I think so. And so I think that it's... And, like, young people are on their screens. Like, 85% of young people play video games. Two thirds. That's the statistic. Two thirds of adults in the United States play video games. We're an incredibly digitally connected community or, like, nation, world, probably. And I think that we can either continue to fight against that and be like, Well, let's get kids outside, which we should. And there are incredible organizations that are doing incredible work getting kids outside. Parents are taking their kids out. We should be getting out more. And it's also about, like, actually meeting young people where they're at, not where we want them to be. And being able to, like, move into that digital space, and to be able to use it as a space to create connection, I think is incredibly important. Most video games don't do that. You know, they're often, like, very violent. They can be very violent. Cozy games are, you know, seen as a big surge, but like, a lot of video games aren't actually meant to create that space of connection and community. Not all of them, but, like, a lot of them. And so what we want to do with this game is to create something where young people can connect with each other in games. So it's a cooperative game. You know, it's like, here's actually how you need a community to be able to rebuild. You can't just do it on your own. And to say, here's a place where you can connect and where you can have community and where you can learn about all of these things and you can be relaxed while you're doing it. Our hope as we start to really develop it out is to create curriculum around it in case, like, parents want to engage with it or educators want to engage with the game as well. But we are in our planning stages
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: for the game. Sign me up!
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Which means that we're currently trying to raise a good chunk of change right now to do the work that we need to do with, like, indigenous elders and, like, the Bay Area. And in Northern California, we're looking to connect with mental health therapists to be able to build in, just like deep levels of, like, relaxation and connection. And so we're in, just trying to raise money to actually start doing the planning work because we want it to be collaboration with, like, indigenous communities in the Bay Area with mental health experts and with young people themselves. Like, we want to, like, pay youth in, like, focus groups, and we want to take on youth interns to help build out some of this. And so we're in the very beginning phases of that. We recently received our first grant with Wild Seed, Wild Seeds Foundation, and so are excited about that work. We're very, very, very much at the beginning of being able to think about what that could look like, but want to, again, just create that space for youth and then to say, okay, so what happens then when we do this? Like, what happens when we create some of these climate solutions that we often don't hear about in the news?
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, definitely not. Yeah, that's the point. Yeah.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: And the most accessible space or the space that is probably, like, the biggest, yeah, the most accessible space in the United States, which is the gaming space, which is where so many adults and young people already are. But we're actually using it for connection and climate solutions and climate resilience. That's really, really important for us. It feels like an untapped spave
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, absolutely. I'm just in awe and I can't wait. And if you have things you'd like to share with our audience about how they might support that, feel free to say so right now.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yes.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Well, how can people support either Mycelium Youth Network or your game project.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we definitely need money for our game, and for Mycelium. We're in a tight space. I think actually almost every single nonprofit I know is in this really, really tight space around, like, funding. So anything around like, that would be really helpful in terms of, like, monthly donors specifically, if there was something about my Mycelial Realms that felt exciting when you go to our website, Mycelium Youth Network, there's a space to put in a memo, but we're actively trying to raise about 300K for the planning phase. And are really, really excited to do this. It's one of the things that I'm currently, like, most excited about right now at Mycelium because I just I am such a gamer. And I really believe in the power of games to transform our imagination around what is and isn't possible. And to open up that future as a contested zone to one that feels liberatory and exciting and that people can get behind and are excited about getting behind because I don't think that things have to be the way that they are. But it all starts from this place of, for me, in my mind, like, from imagination. What do we want to build? And how do we, you know, combine the things we can do.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, you got me really excited about it too, and I'm just, really can't wait to implement it in my own classes. So when you're ready, I'm ready to be a guinea pig. So, as I'm listening to you, I'm realizing I haven't actively actually asked you this question of your own personal climate anxiety, if that's a word you'd even use to describe your sort of existential orientation to what's happening in the world and whether or not this work assuages that and how that works, right? Because that's kind of the premise of the concept of climate magic is that if we can each find our climate magic, again, to go to the point about expertise in our own expert ways, our own unique ways, if we can do that, it does assuage whatever we want to call it, climate anxiety or, you know, just distress about being in a crazy world. You know, how would you describe that existential feeling that you have, and does the work that you're doing assuage that in any way, or is that not the narrative? Is that not how you describe it? You know what I mean?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Yeah. No, that's that's a great question. And I do have quite a bit of all kinds of anxiety, of climate anxiety, of just regular anxiety, performance anxiety, imposter syndrome, all of it. If there's anxiety, there's a good chance I have it. And why games are great at relaxing me, but I think that yeah, I came to this work from a place, you know, going back to 2017 of, like, feeling so powerless with the wildfires that were happening. And, you know, I had just had my daughter, my youngest, a mother, and, you know, I remembered feeling this, like, as the smoke is coming in, and, you know, it was at the time where people were like, Well, just put, like, towels underneath your door so that nothing comes in and make sure you're like, sealing off windows. And I was like, how is this okay? How is any of this okay? And how are we just normalizing this not okayness of it? And you're just feeling like something has to shift or change. And so much of, like, starting Mycelium was both like meeting youth where they're at, but also meeting myself where I'm at where I'm like, I need to figure out something different because I can't continue like I have two kids. Like, I am so nervous for them and the way they're going to grow up in this world and the world that we're going to leave them, really. And there's this great quote, and I'm basing on who said it, but it's something like, great grandchildren asked me in a dream, what did you do when the world was unraveling? And I think about that a lot. And I think about, like, my own kids and, like, what is the world I want to leave behind? What is the work I want to do? And it's not to say that, like, I can, or any individual person can change the entire world, but, like, what do we open up when we're open to shifting to meet the needs of our children, and we're shifting to be more future oriented than just figuring out the present. And like Mycelium is an answer to that, like, anxiety that I feel, but it's also just, like, connecting with people and having real conversations about what's happening with them, what's happening with me. And that is equally as important for me as, like, doing the work itself with young people is how are we connecting and how are we saying to one another, like, stopping and saying to one another, like, this isn't okay. So what do we want to do? To make it better. Sometimes this isn't okay. Let's just sit together and, you know, going back to that we are whole people and just like climate grief or climate anger, and then using that as I don't want to say using that. And then also creating space for, like, climate joy and, like, how are we coming together? How are we singing the songs that we need to be singing together? How are we dreaming? How are we playing? Are we gaming? How are we just being with each other in this moment? And I think that for me is so incredibly important and that it helps more than even going to therapy to talk to my therapist about all the things that I'm feeling. It's just also talking to other people who are experiencing it, too, because so many people are experiencing it. And when we see each other and we connect, there's something, I think that's really precious about that because we're not just you know, we're taking a moment at the pause and at the deep breath and just connecting human to human on what's happening. And so that is incredibly important. My own traditions and ceremonies are incredibly important. And at the beginning of this year, I lost my father who, you know, I love, and he was my, like, island, and he was the first person to teach me to love nature and just sit in the silence. And I would tell him often about some of the things that I was doing. I'm like, And then I did this amazing thing, or I spoke here. And, you know, I told him about, like, the White House thing, and he was like, Oh, right, he was like, he had a little smile, and he's like, but are you happy? And it was such a profound question for me. And he always asked me, like, no matter what I was doing, he's like, Are you happy? And are you happy? And so it's something like that place of, like, trying to find joy or happiness or contentment, even though it's the struggle, I think is really, really important because there is definitely struggle. But there's also just, like, how am I taking time? And it's always a constant reminder of how am I taking time to connect, to make time for myself, to find joy with other people around me? And how is that, like, grounding me just as much as, like, the actions that I'm doing in the world. I think I went on a tangent there, but yeah.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: No, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I think that, you know, to come full circle, that capacity that you just described, is the climate expertise that we're all having to learn alongside things like how to put the towels under the doors and all the rest of it. So thank you for elevating that at every part of this conversation. Is there anything else you'd like to add or anything you'd like to uplift before we wrap today?
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: The only thing I'll add is, I think that place of connection and that place of sharing, and even if that sharing is like, I don't really know, or I feel a lot of anxiety around it, too. I think is incredibly important as we think about what the future holds and what it's going to bring. Um, I think a lot of the times when we see in popular media, whether that's, like, television or movies or even video games, like, there's this sense of, like, our future is, like, apocalyptic in scope, and that everyone's like, fighting to get there. And it becomes so hyper individualistic, right? From like Terminator 2, Mad Max, the last, it's we see it all the time, and we consistently get this, like, the future will be so, apocalyptic, for lack of a better way to say it. And I think that the piece that is always important is, like, is that piece around, how are we connecting with one another? How are we coming back into community? How are we supporting one another? How are we just talking sometimes? How are we breaking bread? Like, what are the places that we can consistently interrupt this, like, apocalyptic futuristic narrative? It's really being shoved down our throats in ways that are like, both like small and big, whether that's through that connection, breaking bread, community, talking to students, talking to young people about it, or whether like it's in really big ways through like, you know, pushing our politicians or creating a video game, or whatever it is, like, we need to find different ways to consistently interrupt that narrative. I think, again, like, we need to imagine a different future, and we do that through the interruption of what is being told to us that the future holds. And so it's not inevitable. We have a lot of agency, which is, I can tell, but I know that we have agency because of how hard it's, the other thing is being pushed. And so I yeah. So that's what I wanted to leave us like, find connection, find community, talk to people about it. Talk to young people about it, especially. You don't have to have all the answers. But it means a lot when young people feel like adults are talking to them because they're oftentimes very, very dismissive. Like, studies show that youth feel consistently dismissed by adults around climate change.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, absolutely. Horrifying, but there we are. Thank you so much, Lil Milagro. It is such a just absolute pleasure and honor to learn from you today. Thank you.
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Thank you. I love the conversation. I appreciate you so much.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: You just listened to my conversation with Lil Milagro Henriquez, founder of Mycelium-
>>Lil Milagro Henriquez: Oh, my God. You are so godamn brilliant.
>>Sarah Jaquette Ray: You can follow the Climate Magic pod on Instagram, LinkedIn, khsu.org. And wherever you find your podcasts. Or connect with us by sending an email to climatemagicpod@gmail.com. Thanks to Cal Poly Humboldt's College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences and Abigail Smithson for editing Climate Magic. Thanks to Mike Dronkers and KHSU for sustaining the magic infrastructure. Thanks to Tibora Girczyc-Blum for creating Climate Magic social media content, and Cal Poly Humboldt's incredible Accessibility Office for producing phenomenal transcripts. I'm Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic. ♪♪ Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt
