Good evening everyone, how are we doing tonight? Great. Good. Are we ready for some King Talks? Yes. Good. I'm excited to be here, my name is Paul Artale. I am the Program Manager for Graduate Student Engagement and welcome. This is a very special night. This is not just part of the MLK Symposium and Rackham's contribution to it, but this is a tradition we're trying to start here at Rackham and you are part of the very first time. You're part of the first step, so that's really cool. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. We at Rackham appreciate it. And these five awesome speakers you're about to see certainly appreciate having the audience. Quick note on the King Talks, like I said, we at Rackham are trying something new this year. Something that's a little bit more interactive, something that allows students to participate in the MLK Symposium.
And for us to have this is both a chance for students to speak both their minds and reflect their research and their opinions, and for us at Rackham to provide those opportunities for students to develop. Because the ability to communicate your thoughts is really important. It's an important skill that goes not just into the… It goes beyond the classroom and into life. This process started in October for us. It started with the call for applications and many students applied for it. These five awesome folks were chosen and then were subjected to going through weeks of public speaking training with me, which they survived, which is good. But they have worked really hard on this. And what you're gonna see tonight is their take on the MLK Symposium theme, which is "The Fierce Urgency of Now". Some of them will speak largely from a research perspective and what their research interests are. Some will speak from a personal experience perspective. All of them will speak from a perspective of something that is important to them and that they want to see a change done immediately.
Something that they feel needs to be changed now. That's what the King Talks are about. And what we call "Teddish style talks" that range from, we're saying 10 ish minutes, so we're gonna go that way. Before we get started, I just wanna thank a few folks who are in the room and recognize some people. First and foremost are Dean of the Rackham Graduate School, Dr.
Michael Solomon is here. If we can just give him a round of applause. If you followed the King Talks over the past few weeks, you might have noticed some of the really cool stuff going out on social media and all the… Just the great graphics and just the push. Our Comm team is here, Matt Nelson, Jameson you're here, they're over there in the corner. If we can give them a round of applause as well. And sprinkled throughout the room, there are several members of the Graduate Student Program's team. We're the folks here who put on all these different kinds of workshops and development, professional development opportunities.
They're here helping out and they've been instrumental in helping me behind the scenes in one way or another, so if we could them… If they could just wave and be recognized, if we could give them a round of applause, that would be appreciated as well. And last but not least, our five speakers who you'll come to know on a one on one basis over the course of the next hour. Let's just give them one round of applause 'cause they put so much work into this and I'm excited for you to see what I mean. Alright, that's a lot of clapping. Now it's time to listen. Our first speaker, ready? Yeah. Alright. Our first speaker is Melvin Washington. He is in the Master's of Public Policy program. His title is called "Same Sheep, Different Day: Towards a More Transformative Policy Framework for Strengthening America's Black Communities." Please welcome to the stage, Melvin Washington. There's something you all need to know about me. I'm a dog person. And yes, that's me on the screen.
But, to be honest, I'm more than just a dog person, I'm a "My dogs are my children" person. I'm a "Put the dog in all the family pictures" person. I'm a "invest in cute little booties to protect his paws from the pavement" person. A "fill his bowl with $50 a bag, never seen the inside of a concentrated animal feeding operation, super organic dog food" person. Yes, I love dogs. And I don't even own one yet. But still, they're fascinating creatures. Take the sheep dog for example. This breed was designed to protect livestock from foxes, wolves, bears, and a whole host of potential predators. Whereas in the United States, we often find them as household pets, in places across Europe, they still serve this original function. These dogs often stand between the flock and what seems to be the certain threat of certain death.
And all they ask for in return is a little affection, nourishment and occasional shelter. But in thinking about this dynamic, sometimes I forget about the dog's owner, the shepherd. I get so wrapped up in the nobility of the dog and the perils faced by the sheep that I never stop to question why they're confined to this particular patch of land in the first place. I don't think about whether if they were able to choose and if given the option they would decide to stay. I don't think about the impact of the shepherds priorities on the system or the resources that the shepherd is able to extract from the sheep, or even how certain protections for the sheep are necessary to extract those resources in the first place. I doubt this is something that the sheepdog thinks about. After all, its just a dog. You and I on the other hand are not. We're human beings, even though our physical abilities and resources as individuals is limited. Our ability to create and imagine collectively is all but limitless.
And sometimes what we create are problems. And the complexity of those problems seems just as boundless as our ability to solve them. Let's think about anti black racism for example. It didn't just fall out of thin air. It wasn't dropped onto earth by extra terrestrial beings traversing the galaxy trying to figure out the best way to exploit people. It was the deliberate creation of men in power who set out to order the world according to what they thought was best. And this context is why our systems aren't exactly designed for racial equity. As a result, racism isn't just daily acts of violence. It's daily deprivations. I'm talking about systemic poverty. Decades of divestiture has created under resourced schools, structurally stunted economic opportunity and a cycle of social isolation in a lot of black neighborhoods.
I'm talking about gender inequities. Black women are more than three times as likely to die from causes related to child birth as their white counterparts, and on top of that they are experiencing skyrocketing rates of incarceration. I'm talking about black LGBQT folks. They're more than eight times as likely to live in extreme poverty, black trans folks are. Experience incarceration at rates close to 50% according to some surveys. Over 20% have been refused medical services or experienced homelessness. And they make up over half of all new HIV diagnoses for trans folks. I'm talking about the myth that we can earn and spend our way to equality. Black middle class households are increasingly downwardly mobile. They live in poorer neighborhoods than their white counterparts and experience some similar psychological effects that we see in other lower income black folks.
A good job and a middle class paycheck won't save you. Its a lot to digest, I know. It's exhausting to fathom and debilitate into experience, but the point I'm trying to make here is this. Black lives are as diverse as the systemic deprivations that threaten them. And we need policy thinking that is as equally as complex. Unfortunately, during a lot of my time in training as a public servant, I've found more sophistication than complexity. I've found trite rationalizations of insufficient frameworks. I've found people who seem to genuinely care about black folks, but don't wanna do the cognitive or material work of transforming the system that oppresses them. I've found sheepdogs. Am I saying that sheepdogs never do good work? No. When it comes to black communities in America, providing basic resources is an admirable goal.
Am I suggesting that all organizations take an all or nothing approach to racial equity? Not quite. What I am arguing though, is that more attention should be focused on how to transform the system as opposed to trying to figure out how to make the best of the system that we have. You see the sheepdog logic doesn't try to redefine possible.
It doesn't seek to challenge the shepherd. It doesn't try to think deeper or beyond the basic survival of the flock. No, sheepdog logic accepts a certain degree of exploitation and oppression as inevitable. It has little incentive to transfer resources away from the shepherd because after all, that's where its food and shelter come from. As a result, the sheepdog services the flock but it serves the shepherd. One interesting example of sheepdog policy in action, comes from the world of community development, more specifically the foundations, non profits, and for profit monetary institutions that finance a lot of community development efforts.
So for example, banks are a large part of the community development landscape due to a landmark piece of legislation known as the Community Reinvestment Act or CRA. Initially passed in the 1970s, its been edited numerous times but the fundamental thesis of the legislation is to get banks to provide services in low to moderate income communities. Due to decades of discrimination when it comes to credit and loans, a lot of these are communities of color. Now, just like the sheepdog does good work, so too does this law.
A lot of these services may help people finance affordable housing projects, start businesses, or even purchase homes. But what work does this do to shift the fundamental position of low income black communities in society? How does this help them actualize their agency? In what ways does this transfer power from wealthy, largely white institutions to the communities that have been deprived for generations? It doesn't. The shepherd is still in charge. The banks still make money off of these transactions. They still retain the power in these dynamics because they still structure the flow of capital into and around neighborhoods. Moreover, through 2008, these same neighborhoods that they were supposed to be helping and working for, they split.
A lot of the sub prime mortgages that went into the financial crisis were the result of predatory lending in these neighborhoods. Another example comes from the world of foundations and how they increasingly operate like private businesses. A lot of non profit organizations are competing for limited resources, so they wanna make the most impact with the least amount of money in ways that appease and attract wealthy donors. The problem with this framework is, structural change is seldom inexpensive, and it's hardly ever popular. As a result, metrics of success tend to focus on the lowest hanging fruit which falls far short of transformative change. These examples are emblematic of a broader acquiescence to oppression that affects everything from our pedagogy to our politics. As a result, we've built an entire industry around fixing the failures of the system instead of committing resources and energy to replacing a system that is obviously designed to fail. To be honest with you, this is something that I grapple with personally.
I believe that everybody should have access to nice things, myself included. But sometimes I wonder how much of my work is for my own material and psychological gratification, and how much of it is for the empowerment of black communities, and communities of color more broadly. So I think it's important that we ask ourselves two questions, am I implicated in the harm of others? And am I placated by the benefits to myself? Sheepdog logic solidifies our place within broader networks of oppression. We may not feel like we caused the wound, but we also don't work to prevent or heal it. Instead, we accept paychecks from the perpetrators for treating the pain. And just like the identity of the sheepdog is invested in its place in this current system, so too may we become over invested in the idea that we are doing the right thing.
That unlike the rest of the country, we are the good hearted people. We are the people who care enough to actually do something. We have morals, we have values, and I get it. The world is a hard enough place as is, nobody wants to hear that they're not doing enough to fix it, or worse yet, that they're a part of the problem. But we need to change this. The result of this logic is people being trained to work and service… People being trained to service the people and work for the system. So, the sad irony of all this for me is that a lot of the organizations and sectors that I spent time criticizing are places where I may be applying for jobs. And, it feels a little icky sometimes. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie. But I'd be lying if I said I felt mentally and professionally prepared to fundamentally restructure the community development landscape, or society writ large.
For now, the moral north star that I try to follow to keep me away from sheepdog logic is a focus on redistribution, agency and healing. By redistribution, I mean the transfer of power and resources from those institutions that have accumulated it through oppression and exploitation and structural violence to the victims of that violence. This includes and means reparations and, as well as financial distribution, but not exclusively. Redistribution, however, is only sustainable if we empower communities and support their ability to determine their own futures, as well as healing them and the world around them.
An example of this logic can be found in the city of Oakland. They recently announced the policy whereby individuals who have been negatively impacted by the war on drugs, whether through incarceration or just living in a neighborhood that has been historically over policed, will receive priority in terms of the issuance of permits for marijuana businesses. This is an example of public policy being used in a way that directs the resources being poured into America's newest wave of entrepreneurship, in ways that account for ongoing and historic forms of injustice. So, when I think about policy interventions for people of color, I ask myself, "How does this change the fundamental dynamics that created their situation in the first place? How does this help them actualize agency? And what work do this do to heal them?" I think these are the principles that should guide our metrics of success.
Because at the end of the day, communities of color are not helpless flocks of sheep, and the people that support them are not canines. Not only are we capable of listening to, and helping to actualize the desires of these communities, but our range of potential solutions is a lot broader than we like to pretend it is. And our politics needs to reflect these realities, because the world is too complex of a place for us to try and change it using the conceptual limitations of a farm animal. It doesn't matter how many degrees you have. How many forums you go to, How many policy interventions you manage. Unless we seek to redefine what we understand to be possible, true transformations, and redistribution, and agency will remain elusive.
Black communities will continue to experience old forms or new forms rather, of old depressions. Same sheep, different death, thank you. Thank you Melvin. Great way to kick off the King Talks. Quick note to my speakers, it's okay to stand for a second and receive applause. That's allowed. Milk it man! Milk it! Our next speaker is in the PhD. In space physics program. Please welcome on stage, Garima Malhotra "Skirts in STEM." Garima, come on up. Thank you. So what games do you guys play in your spare time? Anyone? What games do you guys play? Yeah, Monopoly? Anyone else? What games? Jenga. Yeah, these are fun games. Well, I am a PhD. Student, so guess what I play with my friends? It's a game called "Name a Scientist." So in this game, you name your favorite scientist and mathematicians of all time, and discuss their contributions and how they changed the face of the world.
I was playing this game once with a bunch of my friends and we were going one by one naming our favorite scientist and mathematicians, and at the end of it, one of us realized, that all the names that we had taken were men, there was not even a single woman scientist that had come up. The whole atmosphere became grim. Men, ready to be defensive and women, ready to blame. We then decided, how about, we name women scientist and mathematicians? The atmosphere became even more grim. Only few names came up. Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, Maria Mayer. It is not our fault, because women scientist aren't that many.
Even after being 51% of the total US population, we are a minority when it comes to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Women are only 23% of the total STEM workforce in the United States. Who has watched the 'Big Bang Theory' here? Raise your hands, 'Big Bang Theory' fans. Yeah It's a great show. I see a few hands, it's really funny and you'll laugh a lot when you watch it. But there's one problem. A lot of times, it highlights the stereotypes and biases about STEM. With nerdy brilliant scientists, men, and a sexy blonde neighbor. So forget about real life, we don't have women scientists on TV, and never as a protagonist. Of all the physics professor in the United States, only 14% are women. Take engineering for example, only 11% are women, that's bad, right? So what's the problem here? Let men do all the engineering and women can take care of the rest of the stuff. No, science and engineering are making some of the biggest advances in our society today. Medical breakthroughs, self driving cars, treatment for cancer, and if women don't join in, they will be left behind.
Women with STEM jobs earn 23% more than the women in Non STEM jobs. And this is not just for the benefit of women. This is for the benefit of the whole society. Employers are looking for women for political and economic dividends. So what? Why do these numbers look so bleak, right? If there's so many benefits. So, whenever we try to answer these questions, very famous, cultural stereotype and unconscious bias comes up. There was a study done recently and it was published in the science magazine last year. The study was that there were few children who were taken as a sample. It was a middle school, and they were given two options. They were supposed to choose between two different games. The first game was, for really really smart kids, whereas the second game was for those who think they worked really really hard. At the age of five, the number of boys and girls who chose between the two different games were the same. Whereas for the kids ages six or older, the number of girls who chose the game for the smarter kids, was far lesser.
There are studies showing that the unconscious bias starts as early as the age of six sometimes. I am from India, in case you guys haven't figured it out yet. So, the situation is entirely different there. Everyone wants to be an engineer. And everyone encourages you to be an engineer, and I was even more lucky because I did my Bachelor's from a women's university. So, I never faced or understood this problem until I came here for my grad school and suddenly, it was all around me. And I never realized this until one day the biases were not so implicit anymore. I was with a bunch of my friends, chilling, happy in a car.
We were on a road trip. And eventually we got bored and then we decided how about we play a game? And this time the game was Atlas. Raise your hands if you've played Atlas here, Atlas. See, very few hands. The way this game is played is that you name a country that starts with the last letter of the country named by the previous player, and you go on from there. So, we were in the car and we were playing couple of rounds, three four rounds. And right now we can do that. So, I start with Iceland. So somebody say a country that starts with D.
Denmark, Djibouti. So, somebody give me a country that starts with K. Denmark. Kazakhstan, yeah. Yeah, so it's a pretty simple game. You guys got the hang of it. So we played three four rounds, five, six rounds and towards the end, all of us were struggling with new countries to come up. And at that time the scary letter, letter Y came up, and it was my turn to answer.
I gave it a thought. I thought for two minutes, three minutes and I didn't know what to speak of. So I said, "Hey guys, you know what? I give up. I don't know a country that starts with Y, so why don't you go ahead." At that point a friend of mine jumps into the conversation, and tells me, "Hey, you don't know a country that starts with Y? Are you really serious? Are you really so stupid? You don't deserve to be here.
How are you even here?" I was shocked. What does he even mean by that. I do not deserve to be here. Well, I had no idea what he meant by that. And at that time, all I kept thinking was, "How can I get out of this place? I don't feel comfortable here. I do not belong here." And I kept quiet at that point. And I've been quiet till now, like many other women around me. And it's not just about the biases. These biases become really dangerous when they start affecting life choices. So many women, usually second guess their talents and hence, they do not choose STEM as a possible career field.
And therefore, we often see women underrepresented in fields whose members cherish brilliance. Telling a girl that she cannot do math or she does not belong to STEM, is as ridiculous as telling a black child, that he does not belong to a white school, 30 years ago. And these biases become even harder to fight, when people refuse to admit that they exist, or they fail to see that they exist. I have seen it everywhere. I have heard comments that, "Hey, she's too pretty to be working in a lab." Or, "Hey, I would never date a girl with a PhD, because they are too weird." Well, we don't have barriers anymore, that's the good news, but what we have in front of us are challenges.
Barrier means, "Hey, you're keeping me out." Whereas challenges mean, "We can overcome them by being fearless." And it's not just the men that I'm talking about here. Even women. All of us have unconscious gender bias. We are the consumers and creators of the environments driven by us. But hey, just because that's the way things are, doesn't mean that's how they always have to be. Things are looking positive for us. Everyone saw "Hidden Figures," right? Raise your hands. Yeah? It's a beautiful movie. It's a movie about a team of women mathematicians and their important role during the early ages of space era. And Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to win a field medal in mathematics four years back. We just got started.
We cannot stop now. We need to keep the conversation going. We need to tell our young daughters that they can be the scientists who will discover the next treatment for cancer. We need young boys or girls to discover their passion for STEM, or for any other field for that matter. We need more stories with females as protagonists, as scientists, as engineers, and not just as fairies. We need the myth of a lone male genius scientist working alone in a lab, to die, urgently die. We urgently need to explain to our children that the reason why we don't have women scientists today, as many women scientists today, is because there were laws that were made for centuries to keep them out from these fields.
All of us, men and women, we need to pick up the mantle together and talk about it. We need to challenge our assumptions. If you see something, talk about it, speak up, do not judge. And where you can, change it, so that the next time, when a young girl asks, "Can I be a scientist?" All of us can say, "Yes, you can be anything and everything you want to be." Thank you. Our next speaker is a doctoral student in Natural Resources and Environment, Dominic Bednar and his presentation, Blackout: America's Hidden Energy Crisis. Please welcome to the stage, Dominic Bednar. On a cold winter evening, I found myself perplexed. Perplexed at the howling winds, rattling the windows outside my home in concert with the hissing sound of the oven flames, both echoing inside our 1956 suburban home in Baltimore, Maryland. I was puzzled that the same device used to roast our turkeys in the evening for our holidays was the same device that would provide us with temporary household warmth.
I grew up in a single family household with my mom raising myself and my two younger brothers. My mom worked overnight as a correctional officer. So you know she was tough on crime. And at times, she would work two to three jobs to ensure that we had everything that we needed and more. So, it finally came to me to ask my mom, "Why did you keep the oven open?" And what she told me left me at a loss of words.
She said, "Because she worked so much, she wasn't able to figure out where the draft was coming into our home, and to my surprise, it was because we shattered our storm windows in the back of our house. I remember that day. My mom still doesn't know I did it. But all too often, I've found other family members and other friends have done the same thing to warm their homes. Often at times, leading them to a case where they're doing it and keeping their furnace off to save money on their energy bill, leaving them in a blackout. This case is what we call energy poverty, which is the interplay of low incomes, rising energy costs, and inefficient homes. Roughly 14 million Americans are behind on their utility bills. And a whole host of other homes, actually experience utility disconnects because they're so far behind on their utility bills. For black Americans, this issue is a bit greater. They're twice as likely to be behind on their utility bills, and experience utility shut offs three times the rate of that. So clearly we have a problem with household efficiency and affordability.
So, I wanna quickly gauge what everyone's, at least thought process is or how much do you understand about energy consumption and efficiency? So by a raise of hands, how many folks would say the home on the left consumes more energy than the home on the right? We got a few slow rising hands. How many people would say the house on the right? And, it's understood that most folks know that when we look at energy consumption and fuel costs in tandem for a newer home that's more efficient, that has the benefit of the evolution of building science, and new technology, consumes a lot less, and consequently costs a lot less to power that home. Conversely, when we look at an older home, we see that the opposite is true.
It's clear that America has debilitating infrastructure and is well overdue for household makeovers. A large percentage of these households were built well before the 70s, with only a few built in today's time. So if it's the case that we know that householders have an issue with affording their utility bills, and we have a sizeable number of Americans living in old homes, what are we doing about it? Spending a lot of money.
$129 billion, nearly $130 billion. The federal government has two main programs through which they choose to alleviate energy poverty. The first one is called LIHEAP, or the Low Income Heating Energy Affordability Program. This program provides households with funds to help them pay their utility bills, their astronomically high utility bills. WAP, or Weatherization Assistance Program on the other hand, provides householders with the means, the resources to actually retrofit their homes, and provide a more sustainable solution. But if that's the case, then why are households still in energy poverty, if we have systems in place to help us out? The past has a unique way of lighting the present darkness. As you see the top line is LIHEAP. Over the past 40 years, the United States has pushed forward their method of alleviating energy poverty by assisting householders with their astronomically high utility bills. And as you see, the Weatherization Program, grossly underfunded for the past 40 years. Why is this the case? As Melvin said, "Sheepdog." A recent study that came out last year by the American Council of Energy Efficient Economy found that if you were to retrofit all low income households that you would remove 35% of their household energy burden.
Energy burden meaning, the percent of a householders income that they're paying purely on their energy costs. So if this is the case, what's truly the difference between the house A and house B? Perhaps redlining. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, whereby discriminating householders from purchasing homes based off of race is no longer something that can happen. However, the ramifications of racial segregation are still felt today. This is only but a generation maybe two, in people's householders that they are experiencing today. So for my research, I'm interested in do spacial disparities exist in residence energy consumption and efficiency on the basis of race, socioeconomic status and owner status. And what you find is that, those primarily in communities of color, blacks and Hispanics and poor communities and non renters have the highest energy burdens.
And as you can see on the graph, the one on the left shows household energy burdens encased in the boundaries of the city of Detroit. The full map shows Wayne County and the map on the right shows racial demographics, where again you see blacks and Hispanics again with those high energy burdens. When the forces of oppression are felt, people have always come together to stand up and fight for what they feel is right.
People shouldn't have to make a decision between heating their homes and putting food on the table. These should come as a unit under the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, but unfortunately, this isn't the case in this America. Why should you all care? Why should we all care? Maybe we're not all in energy poverty. What most folks don't know is that buildings are the number one CO2 emitter in the United States, beyond cars, beyond planes, beyond trains. This is cause we spend most of our time inside of a building, whether it's here in Rackham, whether it's back home, whether it's your place of worship, shopping, we find ourselves in a building because we've evolved in such a way that we've been able to construct this built environment.
Half of the emissions come from buildings and if it's that we continue to allow a particular group of folks to consume energy inefficiently, then their consumption by way pollutes the air that we all breathe, pollutes the water that we all drink. I'd like to remind you all what Dr. King says is that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We're caught in an inescapable mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny, whatever happens to one directly affects all indirectly. So what can we do about it? Programs like the NAACP, they're pushing out this, "Lights out in the cold campaigns." That are really pushing for utility disconnects as a human right. Energy is just as important as the water that we drink, why not value it as such? Nonprofits like THAW here in Michigan, help out householders who are looking for a hand up as opposed to a hand out. Energy justice ensures that everyone has the energy that they require for health and well being. Energy justice tackles a component of a much larger social justice issue.
If home is where the heart is, energy justice bolsters that household temple. It enables us to alleviate household inefficiencies. It drives the economy by providing more jobs and it also ensures that no family ever has to make a decision between putting food on the table, or like my family, using alternative methods to heat their home. Thank you. Our next speaker is in the masters in Aerospace… I can speak, I swear. He's in the masters in Aerospace Engineering program, Gautam Nagaraj, "How to save the world a three step plan." Please welcome, Gautam Nagaraj.
If you could solve any problem in the world, which would you choose? World hunger? Poverty? Climate change? Or maybe find the way to always have perfect hair? Some of these problems might seem so large that it's impossible to solve or even make an impact on. But what if I told that you could solve one today? What if I told you the person sitting right next to you, could solve world hunger, but wasn't. And what if it was you? What if it was you who was holding out on humanity when you had a solution to one of the worlds greatest challenges? You might wanna do something before anybody else found out. And today is your lucky day. Today we're gonna talk about how to solve one of these great challenges and we're gonna do that, using a three step approach.
Step one, simplify the problem, step two, ideate solutions to this problem and step three, act to solve the problem. And to avoid any bias today, we're gonna assume you have no prior knowledge of the topic. I realize this can be a bit theoretical. So, let's make this a little more practical. Let's do a case study on one specific problem. Radical climate change, also known as global warming. It's an issue that affects almost every organism on the face of this planet. As someone who dreams of making the world a better place, it's an issue that is very deep in my heart.
A show of hands here today, how many people acknowledge that radical climate change is an issue? Great. For all of you this talk just got super exciting. For all of you who didn't raise your hands, that's okay just play along, it's the process that counts. Also please go talk to scientists 'cause climate change is real. But let's get started with step one, of simplifying the problem. What is climate change? What is global warming? The Earth's getting warmer? Well, turns out there are three ways the Earth can get warmer. Either the sun starts radiating more energy, the Earth starts radiating more heat or somehow heat gets trapped in the atmosphere. And well, option one has been debunked, 'cause Milankovitch cycles cannot explain any sustained radiation from the sun, so that's out.
And option two doesn't work either, because the Earth's nuclear processes haven't suddenly started speeding up in the last 50 years, in fact, nothing the earth does takes 50 years, more like 50,000 at least. So, we're out of luck there. But what about option three, heat is getting trapped. Well, it turns out there are gases in the atmosphere called greenhouse gases which trap heat and the build up of these gases leads to the overall global warming trend we've seen, pretty simple right? But let's take this one step further, we need to simplify this and just look at the root cause of this issue, the greenhouse gases.
There are five main greenhouse gases methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor, nitrous oxides and chlorofluorocarbons. CFCs are heavily regulated by the government due to the impact on the ozone layer. So we're not gonna talk about those today, but let's look at the other four greenhouse gases starting with carbon dioxide. We all know about carbon dioxide. Humans have made tons of it using combustion processes to fuel our cars and power our homes. But, deforestation efforts have also cut down so many of the trees that could capture the carbon dioxide that we have made.
Yeah, that's right folks. Deforestation not only gets rid of the homes for all your favorite cute little animals, it also hurts the Earth, not a good combination. How about methane then? Well, methane emissions primarily come from animal farming and natural gas processes. But unfortunately for us, one ton of methane emissions is actually 25 times worse for the Earth than one ton of carbon dioxide emissions, so that's not good. You may have see a little X in the water vapor thing up there and wonder, "Why is that an X? Shouldn't it have a bar next to it? Well, water vapor accounts for 60% of the entire greenhouse effect, but there are large portions of the Earth that are covered in water.
So, the human contribution to this is quite negligible so we're gonna avoid it for this talk. And that brings us to the last one, nitrous oxides. Nitrous oxides if you haven't heard of them are volatile gases typically they come out of industrial processes. And unfortunately for us, one ton of nitrous oxide emissions is actually 300 times worse for the environment than one ton of carbon dioxide emissions. And there you have it folks, we took this huge problem of global warming and we simplified it basically, to a couple of gases in the atmosphere, not bad for five minutes work right? Okay, well, let's go to step two. Step two, ideate. Ideate solutions to the problem. This is the most pivotal step in the problem solving process. And I'm not here to tell you today that turning of the lights before you leave the room is gonna stop climate change. I'm not gonna tell you that buying a Prius is gonna save the world either.
No, those are nice lifestyle choices you can make, but it's kinda like throwing a small bucket of water on a raging forest fire. It makes you feel good about helping, but instead, let's talk about the greenhouse gases that we have, starting with carbon dioxide. Everyone's favorite thing to do these days is find out how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. So let's not talk about that today. Let's look at the flip side of that coin, how do we get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that's there right now? Well, we could plant more trees, right? Easy peasy, but trees take time to grow. What if I wanna get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere right now? Well, turns out carbon capture technology, exists to remove carbon dioxide from ambient air.
And implemented world wide, we could literally remove the carbon footprint that we're creating. Where do we store all this carbon dioxide? Well, it turns out we can store it in rock formations like basalt. It's a pretty simple solution right? Capture carbon dioxide, store it in the ground. Pretty simple, such a big problem. Wish someone would go ahead and do it already. So, while we're on a roll here, why don't we look at methane too. Animal farming is a huge source of methane emissions. Why don't we all go vegan? Yeah, I don't think that's possible. Not only 'cause I'm sure many of you would be unwilling to give up bacon at breakfast, but also because millions of people make their living raising livestock all over the world.
Is there anything else we can do? Since cows contribute a lot to methane emissions, could we somehow breed different types of cows and feed them different diets in order to reduce methane emissions? Turns out the answer to that question is yes, and I encourage all of you to go ahead and Google cow farts when this talk is over. You will understand. And that brings us to nitrous oxides. What can we do? Nitrous oxides emissions primarily come from the use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides.
Maybe we could just start transitioning from inorganic pesticides to organic pesticides. Whole foods makes a killing on those organic crops. It's not that bad of a deal. And there you have it folks. We started with an amazing challenge of climate change, global warming and we didn't get bogged down in these details of seven billion people on Earth interacting with the Earth's numerous biochemical systems. We left that. We chose to simplify the problem and find solutions to those simplified problems. And now it's time for you to act. Now we come to step three, acting. I mentioned earlier that step two was the most important step of this problem solving process. That wasn't entirely true. Step two is the most important thinking step. Step three, however, is really the most important step of this process, because it involves more than just sitting at a computer. Step three involves action. You have solutions to climate change, multiple solutions in fact. Now you have to go ahead and do something.
Whether that's actually going ahead and investing in carbon capture devices or working with farmers to reduce inorganic fertilizer use, or maybe it's helping reduce cow farts. Whatever it is, you gotta go out and do something. If not, what's the point of all this thinking? I asked you at the beginning of this talk, how you would feel about holding out on humanity when you had a solution to one of the world's biggest challenges. Now you do. Yes. I know some of you may think some of these solutions are oversimplified or, maybe, not simplified enough. Don't worry. Trust the process. Try it again and come up with your solution, and go implement it. I understand that it may be demoralizing to see all the road blocks ahead of you when you try to solve a problem. And yes, it may be scary to go ahead and try to tackle a problem of such great magnitude. But wouldn't it be much worse to have to explain to your friends and family why you let the world down? Fear is a choice.
Inaction is a choice. You don't have to wait for someone else to save the day. We talked about climate change today because it was extremely important to me, but if climate change isn't that interesting to you, that's fine. Go and tackle the problem that you feel is important. You can choose to think differently. You can choose to tackle a problem others see as impossible.
And I ask you all today to go out and save the world not just because you can but because you need to. Thank you very much. Our final speaker tonight is working on her PhD in Communications Studies. Jana Wilbricht with, "Information Health and Social Justice: The Example of Rural US Indigenous Communities." Please welcome, Jana Wilbricht. Imagine you lived in a rural Alaskan village that can only be reached by boat or by plane. You have no public transportation, no public library, very limited, if any internet access, usually no cellular network or it's also very limited, no landline phone connection, and some of the homes in your community even lack electricity and running water.
Because your only source of information is the local community radio station, when you are out hunting for subsistence or fishing for subsistence, you are willing to get stuck in the Alaskan bush if your car radio doesn't work because then you would have to connect a household radio to your car battery just because you cannot afford to miss out on information about weather updates, about hunting and fishing quotas that might be happening and this is your only way to get that information. And that's just one of many stories that I heard while I was visiting Yup'ik communities at the west coast of Alaska during my dissertation field work, in 2016.
I also remember driving in the car with a community member and we passed a gas station that was closed, but I noticed that a lot of people were sitting on the ground, standing around this closed gas station. And he must have noticed that I looked confused, because he just turned to me and said, "Oh, that? Yeah, the gas station has WiFi." And that was in the summer. I'm not sure how that hotspot gets used in the winter. Living conditions like this are very common among many rural native communities and especially, Indian reservations throughout the US, not just in an extreme case such as Alaska. The fieldwork I conducted for my dissertation in 2016 is part of an ongoing community based participatory research project that I partner on with two tribal radio stations. One of them is KYUK in Bethel, Alaska, which serves a population of about 22,000 mostly Yup'ik individuals that live scattered around small rural villages in the area, and it's actually the oldest continuously operating tribal radio station in the US, and they opened in '71.
And the other is KUYI Hopi radio, located on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona, which also serves a very rural community of Hopi Native Americans living in 12 small villages. So by now, you've probably also noticed that I have an accent, and you're right, I'm not actually American, I'm from Germany. So how did I end up working with indigenous communities in Alaska and Arizona, right? Well, if you study what I study, which is access to information and health equity implications, this population will actually immediately stand out to you in the data, or you will notice that actually the Native American population and the Alaska Natives are missing from the data in both academic research and government reports.
So as somebody who was new to this country and also had this particular research interest, I actually decided to focus on the population that I noticed was so under researched while simultaneously facing some of the most severe information and health and other types of structural inequities in the United States. Native Americans and Alaska Natives actually face some of the most severe health disparities in this country. For example, the cancer mortality rate is far above national average, and the five year cancer survival rate is actually much lower than for any other racial or ethnic group in this country. In addition, Native Americans often face the highest unemployment rates, lowest median incomes, and especially the rural communities, such as the two that I visited, lack some of the most basic infrastructure that would be necessary to address some of these problems, and develop economically.
FCC data actually shows that now 90% of Americans are connected to high speed broadband internet, as I'm sure most of us are in this room. Now, if we look at rural areas in the US, that number actually drops to 62%. And if we consider rural areas that are also on tribal lands, the number drops to 31%, and actually many scholars believe that number to be far over stated and actual connectivity to be lower just because of the way that data gets reported to the FCC. The radio station I visited in Alaska was not just my research partner, but actually my home for the three weeks that I worked there. Because there were no hotels or motels or anything available at the time that I was there.
So I lived in the radio station, and of course that meant I had very limited, if any, Wi Fi connectivity. My cellphone didn't work most of the time, and there was no landline phone as only the main station phone was connected. I thought about how even if I had perfect cell connectivity and the landline phone and all the things that I could want, there wouldn't be a 911 service for me to call, because as many rural Native communities, there's no 911 emergency operator service there. I thought about this especially after a station employee mentioned to me that it was good that I was there now and the lights would be on at night, because just last week two people had broken into the station to try and steal expensive equipment.
Of course when I came home at night after a day of my interviews and meetings, I didn't have enough bandwidth to watch Netflix, and there was no cable TV, but thankfully they had provided me with some documentaries about the region on VHS, so that I could learn, about the area with a side of childhood nostalgia. They were great documentaries though. Community radio stations like these do really critical work under enormously difficult structural and economic difficulties. And so especially when it comes to indigenous languages, they make an enormous contribution to revitalizing these languages, keeping them alive, sharing the local culture, instilling a sense of shared identity among people that live in these different villages, and just sharing information.
And particularly, when I talked to 65 community members across these two locations, what I learned is specifically, people cared about super local information. So for example, when we think about health, the Alaskan station might do a segment on why it's important for subsistence hunters to invest in the more expensive copper bullets rather than cheaper lead bullets for hunting to avoid consuming all the toxins that can get into the meat, 'cause that's what they live off.
In Arizona it might be a segment on traditional methods for high desert dry farming that's done in only this particular area. And of course, they also inform the world about important issues that matter to indigenous communities, from their own perspective, that otherwise we wouldn't hear from. Oftentimes the mainstream media today, indigenous peoples continue to be under or misrepresented. Now indigenous peoples are this continent's first innovators. And as such, they have been very resilient and creative in addressing the inequities that are affecting their own communities. Some tribal nations now actually operate their own telecom companies where they can provide internet and cell connectivity on some level to their local community, and even more tribal nations have started community radio stations back in the '70s that still remain the most important source of information in these places today. Last year, the summer following my field work, I actually spent a few months in Washington DC as a research fellow studying the policies that are affecting broadband internet access in rural areas across the US. In speaking to FCC officials, Senators, and all kinds of activists that work in this area and on this issue, I learned very quickly that there seems to be a dangerous disconnect between the academic research and telecom policy.
And also just a general lack of data and current information on the situation in indigenous communities regarding information and media. What we seemed to agree on, though, is that these issues are structural in nature, there are no simple solutions and just providing infrastructure to these communities is not going to solve the problem. So what needs to happen to make sure that indigenous communities, particularly in these rural and remote areas, are being connected to information with all its health, economic, and social benefits, and that they are present in our existing and emerging online spaces? Well, indigenous communities have been oppressed for so long, ever since the arrival of the Europeans actually, that there are no simple solutions and many changes are required at a very structural level. I do believe however that greater public awareness which might lead to greater support for pro indigenous policy and also greater funding to produce some of that data through academic research and also support for community programs that work on this issue would all be great starting points for sustainable change.
For me, working with indigenous peoples of this country has been a great honor and a deeply insightful and inspirational journey, and I'm convinced that Americans cannot effectively envision their future and innovate for the benefit of all without learning to include and listen to the first innovators of their country. Thank you. If I could have all five of my speakers up here? Just line up. Let's give these five awesome speakers one big loud round of applause. Were they good? I was gonna keep you up here, cause it's awkward. Thank you. That concludes the King Talks. If you wanna stick around afterwards, right across the hall in the assembly hall, we have some refreshments. Please feel free to stick around. Talk to the speakers. Talk to them about their topics, about their passions. Come say hello to us. Just enjoy some fellowship with your friends, and thank you very much for being part of this first ever King Talks..