Kate Weiner |
Kate Weiner, Creative Director of Loam.
This interview was conducted by Meg Perret. Sophia Longsworth and Abby Haley contributed to the production of this story.
“My name is Kate Weiner. I'm the creative director of Loam. Loam is an independent publisher and community organization that's passionate about creating spaces both in person and in print, in service of ecological regeneration and social justice. This past year, our team was really interested in exploring and expanding our understanding of matriarchy through the lens of the Indigenous concept of rematriation, as well as the cycle between birth and death, which feels like an especially pertinent framework to work with. Together with Loam editor, Kailea Frederick, who's also an incredible climate justice organizer with NDN Collective, we worked with a beautiful community of writers and artists to put together a magazine Waking the Ground that was an in-depth exploration of what matriarchy means, and the possibilities it holds for guiding us in this moment. Our amazing podcast host, Amirio Freeman, also worked on a special listening series through our podcast Loam Listen with Amirio Freeman that explored birth and death through so many different avenues.
My vision for this new world is deeply inspired by, and indebted to, the team at Loam. Loam editor, Kailea Frederick, who I've been lucky to be in creative collaboration with for more than four years, is truly such a compass for our communities right now. In terms of how she shows up for the world, she speaks so powerfully to civic engagement, to community care, to parenthood, in ways that are profoundly needed right now. And I'm also so thankful to Amirio Freeman, the host of our podcast, whose nuance, kindness, effervescence, and thoughtfulness has created the space for all of these really beautiful conversations to merge with some of the most exciting thinkers in the climate movement right now. I'm deeply grateful to them both for just how much they're doing to hold and to seed new worlds.
I also am so grateful for our designer, Erica Ekrem, whose work is a reminder that femme aesthetics are just as valid, legitimate, conversation sparking, and world changing as any other. So, so deeply grateful to her and her work.
There are so many stories that I could share in terms of my personal experience with gender and climate change. But I have found myself lately reflecting in particular on a memory from when I was a teenager. When I was 15 or 16, I really, really wanted to be an architect and had taken a class where we got to design and build a cardboard build of our own homes. I loved the experience of not only thinking about how the structure would relate to the space, but even just the physical act of sitting at a table with my X-acto knife and graph paper, and putting together this world—it was so rich and beautiful and inspiring to me. I decided I wanted to take a course one summer at a nearby college to learn more about architecture. This course was definitely a very male dominated space. During one of our lunches, our professor invited us to go outside to Union Square Park, which is a really big, beautiful, and popular park in downtown Manhattan, New York, and find a place to ourselves and sketch what it was we saw. It was really an invitation to sit in this place that so many of us passed through, and take the time to notice how the buildings related to the land, and how people related to the buildings. It was definitely an experiment that I was really excited for. But as soon as I sat down to sketch, it just felt like guy after guy after guy came up. “What are you doing? Can I see your sketch? Can I talk to you? Can I sit next to you?” I was reminded again of how hard it is to be a public body. At a certain point, after this one dude literally ducked his head across my shoulder to see what I was sketching, I just snapped my sketchbook shut, like “I'm done,” and went back into the studio room where we had class. As soon as I got there, the three other women in the class were there too. None of us could sit outside without feeling unsafe. I think the reason I've been thinking a lot about that moment recently, even though it happened over 10 years ago, and being an architect is no longer particularly a dream I cherish, is that that experience really did remind me of how important it is to create spaces where people from across and beyond the gender spectrum can feel safe and supported in attuning to and attending to our surroundings.
As adrienne maree brown so beautifully reminds us, where we put our attention to grows, and if our capacity to pay attention to our surroundings and to our location is disrupted, it's so much harder to create the change that we so desperately need in this world. Although that's a moment in my personal history where the relationship between gender and climate change wasn't particularly clear, I have found it to be very instructive in how I relate to it now.
It inspires so much of the work I do in terms of creating spaces, building spaces, and wanting people to feel nurtured in being the architects of a better and more beautiful and just future.
‘Climate justice means gender justice’ is an understanding that our liberation is intertwined and interdependent. It's also an understanding that the thinking that has fueled the crisis we are in, which includes profoundly limiting and violent ideas around identity, ownership, and accountability, is the same thinking that has created inequitable and unjust conditions for so many people. When I think of that expression ‘climate justice means gender justice,’ I think a lot about how the climate crisis is truly a crisis of connection. One way that our culture is continuing to disrupt our capacity to connect is through gendering care, and deeming certain genders to be less valid or valuable than others.
Our culture has gendered care for people who are not white men, even though care is an elemental energy that everyone can access regardless of our gender expression. So what does it mean when we have not only created a gender hierarchy, but we've also then chosen to gender care? It's that we've created a culture where caring is seen as for one type of person and not for others, where caring isn't rational or logical, or important. Where our capacity to care can have the ability to undermine the validity of what it is we're sharing.
One thing that I wish people in the climate movement knew in relation to gender is that our experiences can coexist, rather than cancel each other out.
There is so much wisdom that women, trans, non binary, and other gender expansive people bring to the fight for climate justice that we need to truly listen to in this moment of deep reckoning, unraveling, and uncertainty. One is the value of centering power with, versus power over, dynamics. That is a frame that Kailea Frederick has spoken to so powerfully in relation to matriarchy, and one that I think we continue to need to orient ourselves to. Women, trans, non binary, and gender expansive people in the fight for climate justice have an incredible capacity to hold nuance, which is something we really need to listen to right now. People like Jade Begay and Aletta Brady and so many more, who have this beautiful, compassionate, strong ability to really make space for multiplicity, for multiple ways of being, of knowing, of loving, of relating, of taking action. These are people who remind us that we need to both work within and outside of systems to affect change. The work right now is to continue to listen to, learn from that, and act on that.
I want to hold space for the fact that I recognize and honor that matriarchy might not land for everyone as a frame, and something I love that Kailea brought up in the letter to the editor for our 2021 magazine is this understanding that this is a frame that we're using right now to orient ourselves, and we hold space that it might not feel like the right frame for others for many different reasons.
I recognize that matriarchy can fall short for some and I think that is okay and understandable. One of the reasons that that framework feels so important is there's an ancestral inheritance to it that is personally resonant. I don't see matriarchy and patriarchy as existing in duality, I think patriarchy invites binary thinking. I think the matriarchy has the capacity to invite non binary thinking, thinking that holds space for nuance, compassion, and multiplicity. I have found that there is immense strength in that frame, and it's also so important right now in this time when we need to be looking to do whatever we can to support the LandBack Movement. How do we support the matriarchal communities that have been so instrumental to this push to return the sacred to the sacred, to return the land to its original stewards? matriarchy as a concept is exceptionally instructive and inspiring that shift in a way that is rooted in reciprocity and relationship.
A world with climate and gender justice, to me, looks like a world that has diversity of thought, of expression, diversity of ecosystems, diversity of relationships, and of communities. So much of actualizing that vision for the future lives in looking to people that have held the roles of seed savers, healers, care workers, and those who sustain our society in ways that are nurturing, expansive, and attentive to relationships, and looking to what they have learned, and centering that in the work that we do, and the ways that we relate to one another.
There's tremendous value in looking to people who are in the practice of connection, whether it’s individuals who have skills surrounding how we connect to the earth, how we connect to the soil, and to the plants that sustain us; or care workers, and doulas - death doulas ["provide significant emotional and social support, comfort and practical assistance to patients near the end of life,” NYC Service] birth doulas and full spectrum care doulas. There are so many different ways to be a guide between two worlds, and people who are doing that work have so much to offer around how we connect between different times and places. Learning to navigate the liminal moments [a space or time between, or on both sides of, a boundary of threshold] is going to be so essential right now, in this time where we are living in an era of compounding crises, where every moment feels like a liminal moment where we're walking between worlds. So what would it mean to turn to the world walkers, to the people who have ancestral, intersectional experience in navigating those spaces, and using that as a way to deepen our connection to self, to each other, and to Earth? That to me just feels so deeply needed right now. Those are roles that have traditionally been held by women, trans, non binary, and gender expansive people, and it feels like that is the truest way forward.”