SARAH MYHRE
Research Associate at University of Washington, Founder & Executive Director, Rowan Institute | Seattle, WA
Sarah Myhre in conversation with Monika Samtani in Vienna, VA | October 2018
You describe yourself as a bio-geo feminist. What does that mean?
Yeah. Bio-geo feminist. The term bio-geo feminist comes from the five-year-old daughter of a colleague of mine who coined the term. I'm an ocean and climate scientist. I'm also a public feminist and so I wanted to find a way to encapsulate the combination of those two identities into the term bio-geo feminist because as a feminist, I think about the way that people, power, language, decision-making, and agency are related to the way that we care and cultivate and steward the planet.
What does it mean to you to be a social justice advocate in the sciences?
Being a social justice advocate and a scientist is a uncomfortable place to sit in. And the way I see that role evolving and maturing is multifaceted because as a scientist, I have grown inside of institutions, I have been funded by public money, and I have stewarded the careers of students. Part of my job as a scientist is to function and perform inside of those spaces and in those relationships in ways that incorporate the frameworks of social justice, and include anti-racism, anti-
misogyny, and anti-colonialism as fundamental aspects of the way that I function as a professional. And yet there's also this outward expression of feminism and science, because science institutions then operate and interface with the rest of the world with the global culture.
We know from work done by Project Drawdown that combined together, the education of women and the reproductive rights of girls and women are the number one global solution to climate change. My job as a scientist is to continue to try to articulate how using the framework of human rights to talk about climate action is a fundamental component of the way that we move forward as a global society, and solve our collective problems. I'm no longer willing to sit on the sidelines as a scientist and as an empiricist, and document the world and not have a clear professional responsibility to change the culture.
What does climate change mean to the everyday person?
People forget that we actually are living on this living sphere that is spinning in space and rotating around a star. Our earth is this beautiful manifestation of physics, chemistry, biology, and life, and climate is this beautiful manifestation of the identity of the planet. In the last 4 billion years, Earth's climate has essentially been changing and evolving and moving into new and unique states. Climate itself is the long term average of what we would describe as weather, but it's also the distribution of organisms and ecosystems across the face of the planet. Climate itself is the identity of the planet, and we are all derived from the climates that we call home.
Why is climate change a women's issue? And how is it impacting women and girls globally?
Climate change comes with an onslaught of massive inequalities and risks for the people that are most vulnerable across the planet. Women are subjugated, demeaned, and reserved in spaces that are diminished. We have less education, we have less access to reproductive healthcare, we don't have control of our own lives, and we stand in the face of the greatest risks. So when we think about stewarding human rights in the face of the onslaught of climate warming, which comes with environmental and economic consequences, women are at the front lines, and particularly indigenous women and women of color. That's why climate change is a women's issue, because it’s is changing the habitability and livability of the planet for the people that are at the bottom rung of the socioeconomic global status.
A lot of people living in the bubble of the United States will ask, "why should I care about climate change?" What would you say to them?
Climate change is not an abstraction for the people that lost their homes in Paradise, California. And it's definitely not an abstraction for the 4,000 people that lost their lives in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. It's our job as citizens and as community members to realize that we're all connected. The air that I breathe is the air that everyone else breathes as well. One of the fundamental metrics of how we are connected is the quality of the environment, the cleanliness of the water, the cleanliness of the air - those things are not just obstructions. They directly determine who lives and who dies. So we need to connect these stories that are affecting all of us, are health consequences and the risks that we all face together to this broader story of the changing climate of the planet.
The other thing that informs me is - I'm a white lady. I sit with a lot of privilege. Part of my job is to sit and listen to the voices of indigenous women and women of color, and listen to the truths that they are experiencing. When I sit and I listen to the stories of indigenous women, one of the things that they tell me is that the violence that's being done to their land is the same as the violence that's being done to their bodies as women. One thing we don't know as white women in this country, even though we are all collectively standing up against sexual violence towards women, we white women don't know that indigenous women in this country are murdered at 10 times the national average, and 90% of indigenous women will experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, and 87% of those same indigenous women will be violated by a man outside their tribe. So it's my job as a white woman to listen, and understand, and extend moral weight and value to the stories of women around me, and to connect the violence and degradation that's being done to women's bodies to the violence and degradation that is being done to the land.
We've talked about women of color being the “moral protectors” of feminism. What does that mean?
Women of color are the moral backbone of our culture right now, and we see clearly the critical race scholars like Kimberle Crenshaw Williams and Tirana Burke leading the Me Too movement. These women are changing the world with their voices. As a white woman, it's my job to listen to those voices and to fall in line behind their leadership.
Intersectional Feminism is a really effective frame for understanding the world around us, and I initially misunderstood it. I thought it was this idea of a galaxy of identities where we are all pieces of that galaxy, and we all find ourselves somewhere. That may be true, but that's not what intersectionality means. Intersectionality really means that there are certain kinds of identities in our culture that sit at the intersections of compounding scales of discrimination and violence. When you sit at that intersection, it's a natural place to learn and to get grounded in how society functions. As a white woman, one of my intersections is at the corner between climate science and my identity as a woman, and that intersection of identities compounds the kinds of harassment that I experience. I experience misogynistic denialism in my email inbox every day. So following the leadership of women of color has been profoundly informative in regarding my experience in the world.
How do you understand the concept of misogyny?
Misogyny is often thought of as the hatred of women, or the dehumanization of women. But really, misogyny is a system of punishment that forces women back into a palatable lane of behavior, that when we sexualize ourselves, when we're diminutive, when we are passively subjugated, we're rewarded for that behavior. And we do it to ourselves, as women. We make those choices and we stand in front of ourselves in order to align with the reward that society affords us. And yet inside of that palatable behavior, there's a lot of dissociation from your own stories and your own self. And so for me, I've begun to understand what that punitive system of punishment is and how freedom is outside that palatable lane, and I want to be free.
"...feminism is not just an island that I stand on isolated, and yell from. Feminism is a way of functioning in relationships"
-SARAH myhre
It sounds to me like we don't just need a radical leadership shift in the climate change crisis, but across the board?
Yeah. Big time. One of the things that we are driven by at Rowan Institute is the need for representative leadership in climate spaces, because when white men behind closed doors make decisions for a brown and black planet, that is white supremacy. And there is no evidence in all of history that the leadership of white men alone is sufficient to meet the needs of indigenous women, women of color, and even white women. We need to flip that table and reorder how we make decisions, and who is at the decision making table.
You've taken on a responsibility to be a voice of change, and not only in science.
Women everywhere are listening to you. What does that feel like?
As a cis white woman, I make mistakes all the time. Part of my job is to stay willing to make mistakes in public and to apologize, and keep listening and stay in the space where I'm constantly learning and trying to account for my own actions of erasure, and my own internalized misogyny and white supremacy. So part of this is staying embodied, and staying in my own skin and being accountable for my own opportunities to learn and grow. If I stop growing, I'm dead.
That being said, that's a really vulnerable, hard place to be in public. I do know that it's required, in order to stand up in public, to demonstrate vulnerability. It's part of how you lean into your morals and your values. But it is so uncomfortable because you are exposed and you're like a raw nerve out there. But if I was to back away from these ideas, and to say, no, this is too scary -- I don't think that that's how I should spend my privilege. I am exactly the person that should be able to be safe enough and strong enough to stand up in public and say these things. I can't live comfortably knowing that I'm walking away from the issues that are on the table, the issues of women's lives and the violence that's being done to women and to our planet. And we have to start putting these pieces together. We have to see that the way our hyper consumerism, our devaluing of human life, the way that we subjugate each other, and the way that we extend erasure to people that don't look like us -- all of these components are connected in this broader story of how we have gotten to the brink of this global crisis. We haven't valued this beautiful spinning planet that we all share.
I have to believe in a place where we actually all do share these values, and that we actually can find places to meet each other. Because it might be hard right now, but it will only get harder if we don't do what's necessary.
When you get up in the morning, what's the first thing you think of when you have so much on your plate?
Well, just to bring it down to the ground because I do usually wake up with my five-year-old next to me, and my cat wrapped around my head, and my man friend on the other side of the bed trying to get at least a couple more minutes of sleep. I wake up completely surrounded in this bubble of love, connection, and family. That's part of my human experience -- all these tender and loving moments that continue to inform me that I am so lucky, and I have so much to give, and to shine that light back out. And part of what I want to be able to do is stay in that space where I can transmit the light and love that I experience through these nourishing relationships, and through loving my son, as a conduit for how I can move through the world. So my mornings are full of joy. And once I do some preschool drop-offs, then shit starts to hit the fan with my inbox and with Twitter. But I come to my work prepared with the avalanche of love and togetherness behind me.
As a very vocal feminist, the world is listening to you right now. As strong women, do we need to be raising boys to be part of the ideology shift?
I've been thinking about this a lot because I do have sex with men, and I have a partner who's a man. I have a son. A couple of months ago, I realized feminism is not just an island that I stand on isolated, and yell from. Feminism is a way of functioning in relationships. For my partner, we use feminism as a framework to unpack all the garbage that we bring to the table with each other. There's so many assumptions that we have about what relationships should look like, as we broker power and intimacy between a man and a woman. I have a whole cartload of garbage that I bring to the table in a relationships with a man. But I can use my feminist lens to start to unpack those ideas. There's a lot of anti-women, misogynistic narratives that are like little ear worms inside of my mind that continue to get out in front of me, and prevent me from being seen, and prevent me from actually having intimacy with this partner who is a man.
Part of what I'm trying to do in raising my son is just getting out of his way. I want to ensure that he has all the options to choose from, options around identity and gender, the choices he makes around who he wants to spend time with, what he wants to wear, and what he wants to do with his body. Obviously I don't want to put him in this performative “man box” where I'm like, “wear all of green and navy and play with trucks, and do these performative male things.” But, my kid has always loved trucks and that completely baffles me. That has been one of these bamboozling aspects around gender, that I can't actually prevent society from informing him about what boys do. So instead I have to teach him a critical eye to evaluate society and to be critical of the things that he is exposed to.
What sense of responsibility do you feel as a voice for women and an advocate in science?
I feel I have a lot of pain and discomfort around that question. How do I demonstrate leadership in science, and how do I navigate my own experiences inside of science? We know from a report that was released by the National Academy of Science that academic science has the highest rate of sexual and gendered harassment of any field, second only to the military. I have been at the receiving end of that fire hose of gendered and sexual harassment.
I had experiences when I was an undergraduate doing field work, where I was abandoned in the field by a senior male scientist. Because of that abandonment and because of the really violent and dangerous place that he left the research team, I then was raped by a man in the village. I was 22. At the beginning of my career as a scientist, I was being sexually violated, dismissed, and diminished. One of the reasons that the senior scientist left the field site was because I had said no to his advances towards me. This is part of being a woman in the world, right? We have our own experiences of violence and we have our own experiences of violation. We then move through the world trying to do right by the truth of what that violence and violation does to the human experience.