“It’s been a 400-year run of genocide and slavery that built the foundation for industrialization. Industrialization moving through all the natural resources, coal, uranium, oil… and moving us into a multinational corporate exploit, and we just got the bill, which is climate change.” — Heather Rae, Indigenous Rights Activist and Filmmaker

When Takaaki Okada and I were invited to create a billboard for the For Freedoms 50 State Initiative in September 2020, both of our cities were literally burning from the record-breaking wildfires on the west coast of the United State of America. We couldn’t leave our homes without breathing in smoke and being covered by ash. 

In a time of a global pandemic, a climate in catastrophe, a slate of autocrats in positions of power, and a racial reckoning, we couldn’t help but contemplate the interdependence of each person and living being on this planet. We couldn’t help but reflect on how we’ve failed each other by not designing our systems to respect that interdependence. 

Many of the excuses made for maintaining extractive systems and eschewing the development of regenerative systems are predicated on the huge economic cost of change. Takaaki and I wanted to amplify the words of filmmaker and activist, Heather Rae, so we might better understand how irrationale those excuses are in economic terms. 

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*Link to Heather Rae panel on Climate Change at Sundance Institute.

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