Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica and today we are kicking off our back to school haul week. Every single day this week I will be posting a back to school haul featuring things that we have purchased for our home school from different places every single day. So make sure you're subscribed and click that little bell notification icon so that you'll be notified every single time a new video goes live. We are going to kick it off with a bang today and today's back to school haul will be the biggest one and it will be from Amazon. Now, most of what you're gonna see here today is going to reflect the things that I want us to master in our home school this year.  You can check that out right here. So I'm gonna go over in that video how I plan our home school year and then you'll kind of have a better idea of how we home school and why I've selected the majority of these resources. Without further ado, we're gonna jump in because I am literally surrounded by home school amazingness right now. So we're gonna start with the logic and critical thinking type of things that I purchased specifically for our fifth grade home school year.  So these are one to four players. They take 15 minutes or less and there are multiple different ways to play the games. This one is the wise whale and this one is the astute goose. They're very, very similar. There's actually a third one that we already own as well. They're very, very fun and they're just ways, like I said, to get in that extra logic and critical thinking.   So we have all three of them. This one is mystery teasers. These are brain teasers.  This one is solve the mystery gram. So you can see on the back that it's like a little mystery gram that you have to solve. And then this one is the 30 second mysteries. I don't know how fast you can read. You probably would need to pause it, but there's the case, the clues, and then you have to figure it out. So again, just lots of ways to work on that logic and critical thinking. I also went ahead and bought the next mine bender book. So we've done, I guess, let's see, three levels. So far we're still working on level three, but we're almost done. So I picked up level four for us to work through. And I love these. Every year gets a little bit more difficult, but basically they give you a situation and then they give you clues and you have to figure out who or what is, you know, each one about putting plus and minuses in the boxes. And there are answers in the back in case you need them. To our critical thinking, I'm also adding the critical thinking detective. Now we haven't done this book before. So I got level one, which it says is for fourth through 12th grade. Again, we've never done this one, but it kind of gives you like a case and your suspects and then you have to figure it out. So I thought that one would be really fun. So that is the majority of our critical thinking and logic stuff. Next, I thought I would show you guys some of just like the generic back-to-school supplies that we purchase every year. The first one being the Expo Ultra Fine Tip. These write almost like a pin, but they're a dry erase.  I like that they have that pin tip. A set of paper-made pencils. These are M.L.A.'s absolute favorite. They're mechanical. They're like 0.9 millimeter lead. I believe, let me see if it says that. It doesn't, but it's huge lead. It never breaks. One of these will last for all year long. They're triangle shaped. So they make sure that her pencil grip has never been an issue because of that. They're her favorite. They last all year. I have no problem with them. So I buy a new one every year. My personal favorite erasable pens. These are the Fine Liners. They write very similar to like the PaperMate Flare pens except these are erasable. So I get a new pack about once a year. Maybe twice a year. Sometimes there'll be some in my stocking at Christmas time. But those are my favorite. I like to refresh my stock for that. And then the big Gelocity pens. I really like these too. They're not erasable. So I'm very conscious of what I write with them. But I love the way these write. They're fat. Like the pen itself is kind of fat.  So that's the size of that. And it's gel, so it writes very smooth. And then, let me, I should have taken these out. Sorry guys. But I also grabbed a set of these zipper pouches. They come in different colors. They are, I believe the 9x13. So they fit a full sheet of paper that's laminated in them. They're a nice mesh pouch. And then they have a nice zipper. So none of that, like plastic with the plastic zipper. I find that those don't last as long. But we keep all of our printable games from our unit studies in these. So on most of the Waldoch way, unit studies come with some sort of printable game. And we like to keep them in here so that we can keep them all together and we don't have to worry about it. So these are also really great for puzzles and games too. If you messed up the boxes or have lost the boxes. So this was a set of 12. And we just, we use them for everything. So I went ahead and grabbed another pack of those to add to our home school supplies. Next up, we have what your fifth grader needs to know. I have been buying these, what your insert that you're great here needs to know since I might as in preschool, we do not do them like they're written. I mean, it's written as if it's a read aloud and you could literally read from front to back and your child's supposed to know everything they need to know. We don't do them that way. I do reference them quite a bit. I do like to have them on hand. I will say that up until this year, I've been able to always buy the newer revised version of this and they didn't have a revised version for fifth grade.  But the information in it is still really great. So I still like to have this on hand. I don't know what I'm gonna do when we grow out of those as far as age-wise. I thought this would be kind of cool to have on hand. I don't know why I had never bought it before. It just popped up in one of those like, if you like this, you'd also like this. It's by the same makers and it's books to build on. It is a grade by grade resource guide for parents and teachers. And so as Emily is getting older, it's harder for me to pre-read the books that she's reading.  That way I don't have to always read everything before she does. So it's just nice to have things like that on hand. It makes it easier to suggest books to her. So that is the majority of kind of like our, I guess, back to school resources as far as like the standard stuff. I did also pick up these versatile math and literacy sets for her. I thought these would be really, really great for days that I'm not feeling so well, but she's still wanting to do school. They have kind of like a workbook inside them. Let's see if I can get it out. Full of different math or literacy type concepts. And then instead of using pen and paper, you use the versitiles, which come in this cute little package. And if you get the pattern that they show at the bottom of the page when you flip your versitiles over, then you know that you've gotten it correct. So it's self-checking. It reminds me of hot dots without the interaction. We loved hot dots when Emily was younger. Hot dots are not something that go up to fifth grade anymore. So I kind of was like really, really searching for some sort of self-correcting something that she could do when I needed a minute by myself or I needed her to work independently. And these looked like a really, really great option for that. So I did add these in just for like I said, those days when I'm not feeling it or I have like an interview or, you know, the refrigerator repair guys here or something. And I need her to work without me. These will be really good for that. And then she can move on because they're self-checking. Okay, next up, we're gonna get into kind of the language arts portion of things that I purchased for our homeschool year. If you watched the plan with me video, you know that a few of the things I wanted to work on were different types of writing, as well as figurative language. So a lot of our purchases are gonna reflect that. One of the first things I have here is the hundred task cards for figurative language. I thought this would be kind of cool just to pull one or two from a day. Here's the task cards. They use things like personification, a metaphor, understatement, onomatopoeia, simile, idiom, alliteration, and hyperbole. And each task card just has like a few different questions. So like you would read the little thing and then it has like four or five different questions on it. So it's going to really give us a great kind of way to work on that figurative language. I also picked up the secrets of storytelling creative writing book. It is, let's see, 100 short fiction prompts for ages eight to 12. I don't know if I'll have her do all of it, if I'll have her even do it in this book. I just kind of like the idea of having writing prompts at my fingertips.  So I just thought that would be really cool to have on hand. I also picked up this, don't forget to write for the elementary grades. It is 50 and thrilling and effective writing lessons. So again, I'm not sure if we'll work all the way through it, but it looks like it would be really cool even just for me to read, to know how to teach her better. It has, you know, like make believe science and then it has everything that you would need as well as, you know, like the pages that they would actually fill out. And it's teaching writing at the same time. So I thought those would be great to have on hand. And then I also grabbed the once upon a word, word dictionary. It's where do words come from? Learning new words by understanding their stories. I thought that would be kind of cool to have on hand because it's, it was interesting. Like for instance, Ardvark, and it talks about how it comes from, let's see, it's a noun, it's a mammal that eats insects and looks like a pig with a long nose. And it's from Afrikaans Dutch word meaning earth or dirt. That's the Ard part of it.  So it's just kind of cool to see like where our words come from and how the sections of the words make up something that makes sense. And Emily's really into that kind of stuff. So I thought she would enjoy just being able to look up any word in there and see where it originated from and why. And then a lot of these books that I'm gonna show you are for that figurative language concept that I wanted to work on. So this one is called It Figures. It's fun figures of speech. And it just kind of works through all of the different figures of speech explaining what they are and giving you examples. Your toast and other metaphors we adore. Crazy like a fox assembly story. And then we have these really kind of fun ones. You're pulling my leg. 400 human body sayings from head to toe. And there's a frog in my throat which is 440 animal sayings. Then a little bird told me. And then to go along with the poetic forms I got a kick in the head which is an everyday guide to poetic forms. We got quite a few other poetry things that you'll see in an upcoming video. That's why you're only seeing one here. There are tons of different poetic forms in here though to work through. And it gives you, it doesn't really teach you but it tells you which kind it is. So like here's the poem and then up in the corner it tells you what type of form that it uses. So it's a great way to expose and get used to and start kind of trying to pick up the different types of forms that are being used. The next thing I have to show you are books and it is a ton of books. This first set are going to be for her book club that she takes on out school with Mary Hannah Wilson. This year she will actually be taking two book clubs with her because Emily is 10, like ish, 10 and a half. She had the option to take the eight to 10 year old or the 11 to 13 year old. And instead of choosing one she chose to take both because she loves the book clubs with Mary Hannah Wilson. And some of the kids that have been in her book clubs this year were moving up and then some of the kids that have been in her book club this year were staying. So this way she still gets to stay with all of the kids that she's grown to love and she'll get to meet new kids as well. So we have double the amount of books because of that. I don't like depending on the library for her book club books I want her to be able to read them at her leisure and not feel rushed to get them back. And if she finishes one early I want her to just be able to have it on hand. So these are all of the books that she will be using with that out school book club. And I will link all of this stuff in the description box including the book club classes. So we have Love Ruby Lavender Orphan 11 by the Great Hornspoon. Mr. Popper's Penguins because of Winn Dixie. Elijah Buxton, When You Reach Me. Emmy in the Key of Code. Frendle, Restart, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. Juliette and the Diamond of Enigma. Willow Dean, Wings of Fire. The Wednesday Wars. And the Inquisitor's Tale. Now I didn't have those split in any certain way so that's just all of the ones she'll be doing. I'll have to actually look to see which ones are for eight to 10 versus which ones are for 11 to 13. But either way those are ones that we purchased for this year. I also picked up the Unicorn Quest series. She asked for this for this school year. There's three at least right now. So we have the Unicorn Quest Secret in the Stone, the Unicorn Quest which I'm sure is the first one, and then the Unicorn Quest Fire in the Star. So that is another series that she asked for. This is a series that actually one of my followers recommended and Emily caught me looking it up. And so then I ended up buying it. It is the Animal Ark. It's where animals need you. Amelia and Sam love helping out at Animal Ark. The vet surgery in the village. Join the friends on their adventures. They discover how to look after all sorts of pets. So it's a 10 book collection that is supposed to be perfect for young animals. I'm sure she's gonna speed through them and love them. Some of the titles are Kitten Rescue, Bunny Trouble, Puppy and Peril, Doggy Drama, Guinea Pig, Superstar, The Lost Kitten, Lama on the Loose. So it sounds like something she's absolutely gonna love. I also grabbed, if I can do it without knocking everything over, the 39 Clues series. This is another series that a follower had recommended. They said it was kind of like an older version of the Magic Tree House books. And so they asked if we would read them because they were hoping for a study on them. We will see, we haven't read them yet, but if we enjoy them, that might actually happen. I also grabbed her one that she's been begging me for, like, for forever. And that is the How to Train Your Dragon book set. She is in love with the series and the movies and she's actually listened to all of them on audio but she wants to read the books. So I did go ahead and get her the books. And then I also got, I guess us because I'm hoping that this will be a read-a-lot because I personally want to read these. And that is the City Spies series. So there's three books in the series, City Spies, Golden Gate and Forbidden City. And to answer a question, because I've been asked this quite a bit, how do I decide what is a read-a-lot versus what she reads independently? The answer to that is simple. It's whether I want to read it or not. If I want to read it like City Spies, it's a read-a-lot. If I don't want to read it, then it's independently read. It's literally that simple. I just decide, do I want to read this? And if so, then I read it aloud so that I can enjoy it with her. And if I don't, I'm like, well, you can read that yourself. There are a few of her book club books that I actually do want to read, especially the 11 to 13-year-old ones. So we may read some of those aloud and then she'll do the book club herself. But that's how I decide that.  You guys are going to be super surprised because it's a lot fewer than usual. I was kind of surprised that I didn't need as many games this year. The first one I picked up was the Mathological Liar game. This is the fifth grade version. We've been using these since, I believe, second or third grade. And we really, really like them. They are cases, basically, that you have to solve. The one that has the math incorrectly is the suspect or the person who's guilty. What's really cool about them is sometimes there's more than one. So even if you've solved one of the equations on the cards, you still have to solve all of them because they could all be guilty or only one might be guilty. So we got the fifth grade version. They always use math that's appropriate for that age. So obviously, like some of the younger ones were more addition and subtraction based where we've been doing more multiplication, division and fractions lately. Her and Kevin normally do these along when they do their STEM day, their kind of lessons. And they absolutely love them. So they requested that I grab fifth grade. I also grabbed the Tall Tales Expansion Pack. I didn't even know that this existed. I don't remember how I came across it. I'm sure it was in one of my story telling type of searches, but Tall Tales is a game that we absolutely love. And so when I realized that there was an expansion pack, which includes, I think it's like 12 more, 14 more game pieces and four more story cards. I knew we had to have it. So it's a game that we still enjoy frequently even now. A little wordy, this is rearranging your letters until you've come up with a word and then using clue cards to try to figure out each other's secret words. And you're also writing it down to keep it safe. So it seemed like it would be a really great two player game, which finding two player games is kind of difficult that are two players and fun. But it looks like it would be a great two player game that would work on spelling and just word fun in general, but like vocabulary. And I really, really love when we can do that with a game. And then Steal the Bacon is by the makers, Dolphin Hat, which are the same people who make the game Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. A friend of mine recommended this to me. And so we bought it because Emily is obsessed with Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza and I'm sure she will be equally obsessed with Steal the Bacon. So that one is just a fun add. And then I also added the 24 game. I got the two pack that has the single digits and the double digits. This was kind of a two for one. So I actually bought this initially for our logic and critical thinking because that's our one thing this year, but then it also happens to be math. So this is one of those two for one things. You have to look at the card and figure out a way for it to be 24 based off of what you're looking at, whether that's addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. And like I said, you have the single digits and the double digits. But I just thought if I can get logic and math in and one fell swoop, I'm all over that. So that was a given. Blobby's Pizza is a super fun game. We've played it with friends and it happens to also incorporate fractions using pizzas and monsters. Like how can you not love that? So you get like the little guest checkbook and everything. And it just looks like a really fun way to get some fractions in. Like I said, we've played it with friends and we enjoyed it. I think we'll really like it as a family as well. Fracto, again, you guys fractions was something that we really wanted to work on is a fraction card game. The winner is the king of the jungle. Anytime I can incorporate animals and games, she's all in, so fractions that way. And then technically I could have printed something like this. I didn't really need this, but it wasn't that expensive. And I just liked that it was already done for me. So it's fraction war. So you can just play war using fractions. And she really likes fractions, but you get to compare them because you can see them there. And then it kind of lists some of the equivalent fractions on the bottom. Anyway, I just thought that would be kind of a really quick way to see like how good is she using her fraction skills. And then we grabbed outnumbered. This is a really, really fun math game. Like I've heard so many good things about it. I knew we needed to add it to our collection and it's cooperative. Finding a cooperative math game is next to impossible. There's not a ton of them. There's maybe a handful. So the more and more I kept hearing about this when I saw it on Selen Prime Day, I knew we had to have it. So I grabbed that. And that's it for games, you guys. Look, didn't I do great? Okay, next up we have art. I picked up these Spot the Differences books. These are gonna be one of those kind of double duty things. It's art and logic and one. These books are amazing. They have 25 different masterpieces. And there is the original masterpiece and then a kind of different one to the side of it. And you have to spot however many changes it tells you. And then there's also these little facts all around that tell you about the masterpiece and about the artist and the kind of where it's at now, the medium that was used. We have book one. We've gone through it multiple times. And so I decided to add book two, three and four to our collection so that we could have more of them to do. I also picked up the Discovering Great Artist to add to our collection as well. This is really cool because it has like a biography of the artist on one side and then an example of a way you can recreate their artwork on the other. And there's 60 different artists in here. Now we do have a subscription to Chalk Pastel and Masterpiece Society and they both are amazing art programs, but they don't have all of the artists that I was hoping we would get to this year. So that's why I picked this one up. I figured between the two subscriptions and that book we could cover the majority of the artists we were wanting to cover. And then along those same lines, obviously to do art, you need art supplies. So I picked up quite a bit of art supplies. So we have 12 canvas panels. We have some basic liquid acrylics. We have a new set of Prismacolor pencils. This is a set of 48. I only got one set of these. I'm hoping that we can all share because those are really expensive. I also got a set of liquid watercolors for us. I got two sets of micron pens in the varying sizes. Let's see, we have some white gel pens which are great for highlighting a set of charcoal pencils. Three of these drawing gum pens that way we could each use one at the same time since there's not multiples in the pack. I got us these brush sets. I'll just show you, there's 15 brushes. And so I got three of those so we would each have our own brush set. We'll be writing our names on them. I also got two packs of these Arteza. They're multi-medium mixed paper pads. So it gives us four total. We really only needed three, but it was more affordable to buy the two pack than it was to get single packs. So that way we have four of those to go with all of our art supplies. And then for some of the taping off, I got some of the artist's tape so that we hopefully won't rip our paper. I've used paint or tape before and I always have trouble with it. So I'm hoping that that will work better. And then because we love nature journaling as much as possible, I got us new sets of these like little Windsor watercolor travel sets. They're very small. You can see it's like literally the size of my hand. So I got us three of those. So we'll each have our own and these Arteza landscape books. So there's one for each of us. They are, I believe the five by eight size, they have the ribbon in them so that you can mark your page. It's a watercolor or mixed media. So it's very thick. It doesn't go through. And then I just got each of us one. So we'll just have these three books and then these three things of watercolor and we'll be good to go for nature journaling for the year. And then the last thing I have, if you watched our Reflections video at the end of last home school year, you heard Emily say that the one thing that she wish we had done more of was bake together, getting the kitchen baked and cooked together. So I got this set of Kid Chef Everyday books. It's Kid Chef Everyday Cookbook for Foodie Kids. And then the Kid Chef Bakes for aspiring bakers. And then a Kid Chef Bakes for holidays because we do a lot of holiday theme poetry tea time. So I thought this would hopefully encourage her to take charge more. I'm happy to get in the kitchen with her, but I was hoping with these kid-friendly cookbooks that she would make a list of supplies and just kind of take charge and say, hey, this is what we're baking and this is what I need and let's just do it because then I'm not gonna argue and we will definitely get it done because getting in the kitchen is one place I'm not the strongest in. So that is my hope for that. And then I also grabbed these two 500 fact books. We have similar ones that we've really enjoyed by the same company. So this is 500 Facts about American History for Kids. And then we have 500 Facts about World History for Kids. And Emily just likes having these on hand. It's, I mean, it's very short and concise and it's a different place or time or event. And then it gives her a place to start and a place to find out more information. So it's just, like I said, little bite-sized piece of information, nothing huge, just enough and then she can go further and dig deeper if she would like. So that was the world one and here is the American History one. All right, that's it. That is our Amazon haul for back to school for our fifth grade home school year.


I mean, this is a really problematic idea that the way to tackle inflation is to push millions of people into poverty and out of work. It's completely unnecessary. And as I said, we'll do nothing for the main drivers of inflation, which are fossil fuels and food prices caused by climate change and ecological stress. We're in different times. These are system level challenges. And unfortunately, what we're seeing is economic policy that just isn't catching up. And until we see a more intelligent approach by not just the Bank of England, but the Treasury and a wider economic strategy, then we're going to continue to see the devastating effects these interest rate hikes have on households.


Good afternoon, everyone. Happy hump day. Thanks for joining us today for the third installment of our Climate Adaptation Data Week Online Briefing mini-series, Dan Berset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. This mini-series is part of our work to raise awareness of coastal resilience issues for policymakers and the public, and highlight climate change solutions and resilience strategies. On Monday, we heard from two experts about data needs in the state of Washington. Yesterday, the topic was the use of vulnerability and sensitivity analyses to evaluate the risks to national parks. If you are unable to join us yesterday or Monday, or if you've missed any of our previous briefings to date, you can visit us online at www.esa.org for video recordings and written summaries. Today, our mini-series will have two more installments after today. Tomorrow, we'll bring you bridging the gap between science and decision-making, followed on Friday with weather and social data to inform participatory planning initiatives. Taken individually, those words are easy to say, but when they're all written together in sentences, these are very technical, and I get all sorts of tripped up, so sorry about that. Be on the watch for briefings on two more areas, Alaska next Tuesday, April 21, and on a date TBD about Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. When you visit our website, you can sign up for our bi-weekly Climate Change Solutions newsletter to help stay up-to-date and informed. As I described earlier, this briefing mini-series format is part of our adaptation to the new normal, and this new normal will be with us for a while, apparently, which means it is critical for us to stay focused on the urgency of climate change. Our goals for this week-long, regularly scheduled briefing mini-series are to explore a topic in greater detail and recreate online more conversational dynamic. You can find the complete schedule in this briefing mini-series online at www.esa.org. Please also take a moment to complete our survey to tell us what you think about this mini-series format. Thanks to everyone who's already offered your thoughts, feedback, and ideas for improvement. We take that all very seriously, and we appreciate your time. But here we are on Wednesday to learn about cultural heritage and climate change. After my presentation, my colleague Amber Todorov and I will once again co-moderate a discussion, and you can participate too by following us on Twitter at EESI online or by sending us your questions to EESI at EESI.org. We do our best to get all of them, but yesterday, for instance, we got an awful lot of questions, which we really appreciate. So if you didn't get it answered yesterday, please still reach out today. Reach follow us online, follow us on Twitter. We'll do our best to get to you today. Today, we will hear from Marcie Rockman. Marcie is an archaeologist with experience in national and international climate change policy. Her research focus is how humans gather, remember, and share environmental information. And she's used this to address situations as diverse as cultural resource management in the American West and Homeland Security risk communication in Washington, D.C. Between 2011 and 2018, she served as the inaugural National Park Service Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources. She is now working with the International Council on Monuments and Sites as scientific coordinator of a project to improve incorporation of heritage in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She also works with the nonprofit CoEqual here in Washington, D.C. to provide climate change research for the U.S. Congress. And with that, Marcie, welcome to online briefing today. I really look forward to your presentation and our discussion afterwards. Thank you so much, Dan. And go ahead and share my screen. All right, this is where I just need to ask, can you see slides or the first slide? It's looking good. Thank you. Okay, great. Thank you so much. So good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. I am really, really pleased to be here. What I'm, what I'm stepping in to talk about today is, as Dan just introduced, is cultural heritage and climate change at the federal to international levels. And the focus of my talk today, the organization of it, oops, is a paper that was just published this past Monday afternoon in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled, Expanding Use of Archaeology in Climate Change Response by Changing Its Social Environment. I'm going to start the series this week is about climate and data. And I need to just straight up, say straight up overtly, this paper is not about climate and data in per se, but issues of how data from and about archaeology are compiled in relation to climate change, how that data are, how those data are paid for and how it's shared and used or not are woven throughout. So I'm going to point to those data issues where I can, and I'm happy to dig in further in the Q&A. As a local author, Carrie Ritz and I are both archaeologists, and we both worked in the federal government for several years. As Dan just introduced, I was with the National Park Service in the role of National Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources. Carrie was with the National Science Foundation and then the Census Bureau. Both of us also served with the Social Science Coordinating Committee, SSCC, of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is the program that puts out national climate assessments. In this time, both of us were working in various ways to better connect archaeology to efforts to respond to climate change. And in doing these things, we both ran into roadblocks and issues that, as we compared notes, they seemed to be bigger than any one of our individual projects. At risk of sounding very dramatic, it felt we were fighting forces much larger than ourselves. And so we asked, what's going on here? How can we describe what's happening? And most importantly, how can we design some solutions that are also bigger than us and fight these forces at the right level? This paper is our first try at answering these questions. So I'm going to start where we started. And that's with a call that was made in 2018 by world leaders at the conclusion of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 24th Conference of the Parties, known as COP24 in Poland for social and political ambition to act on climate. We started here because their call also raises questions, not only how can such social and political will be realized, but how can and should the world address all of the historical, cultural, economic, equity, justice and communication issues that are inherent in deciding what those actions should be and how to move them forward. Now these issues and questions exist, in part, because humans inhabit two types of environment, a natural environment and a social environment. The natural environment is the geophysical, atmospheric, marine and biotic worlds. And as we know, it's being changed by increases in greenhouse gas emissions from human activity and related warming of the climate. The social environment is created by human interactions, our values, expectations, perceptions and beliefs. The social environment shapes what actions are considered to be possible, acceptable and desirable. The changes that were called for by world leaders at COP24 are changes to the social environment that will make possible, acceptable and desirable action to address climate change. Now I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into sim theory for just a moment. I expect everyone listening is familiar with the theory of natural selection. There's a diversity in a given population and those elements of the population best suited to the environment are the ones most likely to survive. We most often talk about natural selection with respect to the natural environment, but this frame can also be applied to our social environment, meaning that ideas, beliefs and practices that are best suited to the social environment are often the ones that are most likely to be chosen. Whether or not what is chosen in the social environment is best suited to the natural environment is not a given. That's something that society needs to figure out separately. I'm going to put down the theory for just a little bit now. Now in very brief terms, archaeology is a means by which we can study the intersections of natural and social environments over time and across space. When you add elements of the broader category of cultural heritage of which archaeology is a part like buildings, structures, monuments, landscapes, museums and archives and then intangible things like oral traditions, arts, manners, rituals, practices and knowledge that have come into the present from the past, there is a lot of data available about past natural and social environments and how they interacted. At the same time, methods of doing, funding and managing archaeology and other heritage require that society at large figure out what we value about the past.  Bringing these ideas together, the reason that Carrie and I cared so much about our work and trying to overcome the road blocks that we were facing was because we could see that archaeology has a lot to share with modern global climate response. Both the information that it provides and as a way to help address the complexity of the modern social environment. I'm going to give you three more detailed examples of what I mean by this, of what we mean by this. Now my first example is from Lake Mavatin which is in northeastern Iceland. This area is a major breeding ground for waterfowl and it's currently understood to host some of the greatest waterfowl diversity on the planet. Current waterfowl harvesting in this area prohibits taking of the live ducks and it allows collecting only half of the eggs in any given nest. Historic documents describe these management practices as going back to the 18th century. And this is where it gets really cool. Archaeological evidence suggests that these practices go back much further to the first settlement of the region in the 10th century. This combined evidence suggests that human exploitation of these waterfowl populations is actually an example of sustainable harvesting that has operated on a millennial scale. Now the UN has set out its sustainable development goals which set 17 targets for a more livable global future. And while we can set sustainable goals now and we should, sustainability itself can only be realized over long periods of time. So these findings of archaeology in Iceland describe in a way that no other scientific approach can and outcome that the global climate response is looking to create. What the community around Lake Mifatn achieved was a balance between its natural and social environments, production and consumption shaped and held over generations. This archaeological work shows that this kind of sustainability is possible and this is what it can look like. The first example is from Lowell, Massachusetts. This is where some of the earliest industrialization in the U.S. took place. Construction of water powered textile mills began in the 1820s and archaeological work at Lowell has looked at things like ceramics and glassware, among other things, changes in the placement of plumbing. It's all relevant. And what you can see in these changes are transitions from early paternalistic but generally equitable relations that are more rigid and less equitable structures by the end of the 19th century. These changes also track changes in the labor force and the rise in competition from industrial centers starting to use fossil fuels such as coal. What the archaeology at Lowell describes is the history of the system that's created climate change. Now no one at Lowell set out to create climate change, but the dynamics of labor, energy and economy over time did. What's fascinating about Lowell is we can literally see these relationships change over time. We can put our hands on them with each shift reflecting emerging social priorities. My third example is the very practice of archaeology as it takes place in the U.S. under the National Historic Preservation Act or NHPA, which is what established the National Register of Historic Places, which is the plaque I am showing you right here. Now the NHPA requires that any federal undertaking assess the impacts of a project on significant heritage. If significant heritage will be affected, appropriate treatment must be developed. Very briefly, significance here means meeting the criteria of the National Register of Historic Places. I could talk about these criteria for hours, but all I'm going to say here is that these criteria make it possible for us to discuss what is most important for society to save for the future. Now figuring out what to do about impacts to heritage is one of six consultation process. This process identifies stakeholders, it shares information about impacts, and it develops consensus around treatment. Most treatment takes the form of something like avoidance, but it doesn't have to. The process actually allows a great deal of creativity limited only by agreement of the stakeholders and managing agencies. What this means is there are already in place processes and processes to engage communities with places that are important to them and the risks to those to develop consensus. The significance criteria together combine attention to a range of economic, historic, and cultural issues which are the sorts of things the global climate response needs to address. And the archaeologists and resource managers who work with these processes are skilled at using them. But both these data and these methods are not currently being substantively used in major climate response. This includes the international level and the U.S. level. And I'm going to give you an example from the U.S. to illustrate what I mean. Now I've previously mentioned the U.S. Global Change Research Program, USGCRP, which prepares the U.S. National Climate Assessments. The USGCRP was founded in 1990 with a charge to develop and coordinate, quote, a comprehensive and integrated United States Research Program which will assist the nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human induced and complex processes of global change. It's comprised of representatives from 13 federal departments and agencies shown here. Now since the USGCRP founding, the National Academy of Sciences has called it out several times for gaps in attention to social science. Despite these calls, such gaps are still evident in national climate assessments. Now the NCA's are massive documents produced by a great deal of volunteer labor by scientists across the country. They are major accomplishments and I need to acknowledge that. The concern that Carrie and I have are for how they've been developed and structured. And for example, the NCA4 has a chapter on adaptation and adaptation is really about the flexibility that we can see in human systems. The Social Science Coordinating Committee, which we were both members, reviewed this chapter and we noted that of its 20 authors, not one had primary training in the social sciences and technology archeology. That means attention to places that communities value and the creativity such as can come from section 106 consultations were not incorporated, nor were examples of what sustainability can look like, such as at Lake Muvaten or similar examples in the US. As well, both the third and fourth US National Climate Assessments list Indigenous peoples as a sector in a named chapter. I'm just showing you a table of contents here. These chapters note that Indigenous peoples have history and heritage, and this history and heritage will be affected by climate change. This is absolutely true, and this must be in there. But other decisions that were made about chapter structure and authorship, also commented on by the SSCC, meant that history and heritage are essentially co-defined with Indigenous peoples, and that the history and heritage of communities such as Lowell, Massachusetts, which is the history of climate change itself, were not included. So going back to our original questions, why is this, and what can be done to fix it? Now currently, the US does not have a clearly named agency for archaeology and cultural heritage. Other countries do, such as Historic England, Historic Environment Scotland, Ministry of Culture and Sports in Greece, and the Ministry of the Culture in Peru, just to name a few. In the US, the lead federal agency for cultural heritage is the National Park Service, or NPS. Park Service is responsible for management of cultural heritage in all units of the park system, and it provides policy and guidance for management of heritage on federal lands, and it processes funding to states, tribes, and local governments. But all federal agencies that manage land or property are responsible for the heritage on their property. The NPS doesn't do it for them. Other archaeological work is done by the Smithsonian. Academic research is funded by the National Science Foundation, and international and diplomacy aspects are led by the State Department. This fragmented approach to managing archaeology and heritage at the national level, limits the capacity to address the intersections of climate change with archaeology and heritage. I haven't mentioned at all what we know about the impacts of climate change on heritage, and there are a lot of them. If you had a chance to see Rob Young's presentation yesterday, Rob talked about efforts to assess the vulnerability of park service infrastructure to sea level rise and storm surge, including historic infrastructure like the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. As difficult as it is to build a view of vulnerability across the park service, and Robin's team are doing a really good job, currently there is no compilation of the vulnerability of heritage across all federal lands, let alone all of the U.S. Further, despite its many roles for archaeology and heritage, the park service prioritizes its responsibilities with respect to national parks and natural resources, and the disparity in this attention has grown in recent years. No one estimated of two-thirds of all national parks have been established to preserve cultural heritage. And the NPS is responsible for heritage that exists in any park, regardless of why that park was founded. But while funding and staffing for natural versus cultural resources was relatively equivalent in 1995, from 95 to 2008, which is the most recent date for which I have data, funding and staffing for natural resources increased by 71 and 31%, respectively, while funding and staffing for cultural resources decreased by 19 and 27%, respectively. This imbalance of natural versus cultural is replicated in the structure of federal programs to address climate change, particularly the USG CRP. And again, I'm going to point to its 13 member departments and agencies, and I'm going to give you a very basic visual level of representation. There are several USG CRP agencies with legislative mandates to address the natural world that reference that responsibility in their names. And what I'm showing you here, like Fish and Wildlife Service, US Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, you can see the importance of what they do in the name. The NPS is the lead federal agency for cultural heritage, but it doesn't have that responsibility clearly indicated in its name. So even at this very visual level, archaeology and heritage are effectively invisible in the makeup of the Global Change Research Program. These gaps, unfortunately, are not balanced out by academic research. NSF is the primary government funding agency for this kind of research. Archaeology generally sees about 5% of its division budget, and in 2019, it was funded at the level of about 4 million. Just from one point of comparison, the National Ecological Observatory Network, which is one of NSF's programs for study of the natural world, was funded in 2017 and approximately 633 million since its founding in 2017. Now, these comparisons are using only publicly available data, and we know that they are not direct, but they illustrate disparity in the relative levels of investment. And one more thing, this disparity is also not balanced out by major climate and conservation focused NGOs. I can't show you all of the relevant information here, but quickly to say, that the scope of NGO attention to climate are generally in the form of climate models, economic and infrastructure sectors, and this distribution is generally similar across major NGOs. Where human society is addressed, it's primarily in terms of human health, jobs, and international development. Where there is any attention to history inherited, it's generally like the National Climate Assessment, part of attention to indigenous peoples. And I need to again recognize here, that there is a lot of work, but the point is archeology and heritage are also effectively invisible here. So now I can get, come to several explanations, why there are these connections between all of these examples. And I'm going to briefly return to our natural and social environment frames and their related evolutionary processes. Now, if you're in a social environment and you want to choose an idea of belief or practice, that's likely going to suit your environment. How do you decide? There are two common biases that are probably going to influence your decision. One is frequency bias, which is choosing that which is most common around you, and prestige bias, choosing that which is done by highly visible or high status people or organizations. If you follow behavioral economics, their availability heuristic is a very similar frame. Both of these types of processes describe how that which is most common or visible in a social environment is taken to be that which should be replicated or carried forward. So our proposal is that while study of climate change processes began in the physical sciences, social processes have reinforced this focus across government, funding, research, and advocacy to the extent that the cultural worlds that must generate the social and political will to address climate change are not a widely recognized part of it. Right, so with that, what do we do? And Carrie and I have come up with four suggestions. First, we recommend founding a named Federal Climate Heritage Coordination Office. This office would be responsible for connecting agencies that address climate and or heritage, fostering relevant research, and representing heritage and interagency and other government forums, and possibly helping with the compilation of data. While additional analysis is needed of where this office would sit, perhaps alongside or within the USGCRP, this office would provide greater visibility for archaeology and heritage both inside and outside of the federal government and leverage existing knowledge and resources. Two, we want to link archaeology and heritage in climate research and investment. Currently, for example, NSF lists archaeology as a fundamental science, but not other heritage of heritage. Well, definition of what is a science and not a science is too big for us to dive into here. What Karen and I wanted to recognize is that this approach has the effect of incorporating the kind of research that generates things like the sustainability findings at Lake Movottin from support for contemporary work with climate adaptation that would benefit from those findings. So wherever these can be linked, they should be. Three, foster climate heritage demonstration projects. Several member agencies of the USGCRP manage or fund diverse adaptation projects. We recommend an initiative to deliberately bring elements of heritage into these projects where they have not been used before. This could range from archaeological contributions to land management to consultations with communities about contemporary important places. These demonstrations would allow assessment of how useful heritage can be in addressing adaptation projects, and it would help introduce more climate practitioners to what archaeology and heritage can do. And then fourth and finally, we recommend expanding NGO attention to heritage. Rapid attention to connections of archaeology, heritage and climate change, both in the US and around the world, are most likely to be most effective in the realm of NGOs. There are several cultural heritage NGOs, ECOMOS, which is the one that I work with, and I'll mention the Florida Public Archaeology Network as another in the US, and the Scottish Coastal Archaeology and Problem of Erosion, or SCAPE Project in Scotland, are all mobilizing for climate change. ECOMOS, for example, put out a major roadmap document last year to help the global heritage community better support the goals of the Paris Agreement. But due to long-term underinvestment in heritage, these organizations can't make all the change that's needed alone. ECOMOS has national chapters in 107 countries, but it does most of its work on a volunteer basis. So it can't take on everything, but knowledge and expertise exists in these organizations, so by linking with more traditional climate sources, we may be able to quickly grow capacity and engagement. Finally, in that long list of NGOs that I showed you, I wanted to point out that there is currently, it appears to me, to be overlapped in major areas of NGO attention to climate change. We are not recommending that all climate or conservation NGOs should address archaeology and heritage, but we think one or some should. And we suggest that at least a portion of this engagement should go towards collaborative partnerships between governmental or intergovernmental climate science organizations and cultural heritage. Demonstration projects such as I just described might be one approach, and our collaboration with the USGCRP for the next national climate assessment could be another focus. Now taken all together, these are not going to solve all of our issues, but they will give visibility and opportunity to bring the experience from the full depth of human experience, which is what archaeology and heritage is, to the challenge of climate change. And given the scale of the challenges we're facing with climate change, I hope it's possible to give at least at least some of a chance. And so with that, I am going to say thank you for listening, and I will be more than happy to do my best to answer whatever questions you might have. Thanks, Marcy. That was really interesting, really great presentation. And hopefully this briefing helps with your fourth recommendation, right? Expanding NGO attention and linking archaeology and heritage and climate. Thanks very much for your presentation. So perfectly in line, right? We're perfect alignment. Thanks very much. Just a quick reminder to folks who might have joined us a minute late, or maybe heard Marcy reference back to Rob's presentation yesterday. Just a reminder, our video recordings, the presentations and written summaries will be online later, and actually not too much later. There's lots of detail in those presentations, so if you missed something or if you want to go back, or if you want to follow Marcy's recommendation and link archaeology, heritage, and culture and climate change in your own work, our online briefing depository will help you do that. So we're going to turn now to Q&A. We have a good amount of time for Q&A, and just as a reminder, you can send us questions by following us on Twitter at EESI online. You can also send us an email with your question at EESI at EESI online. And for the Q&A, I'm going to turn to my colleague Amber Todorov and introduce her. She's going to kick us off. Amber is on our policy team and is one of our policy associates and has been working with EESI for almost a year, so she technically outranks me seniority-wise. Yeah, I guess seniority-wise. So Amber, when you're ready to go, take it away. Great. Thanks so much, Dan. And thank you, Marcy. This was so interesting and really got me hyped for cultural and historic preservation, which is great. So since this is data week and you've laid such a great foundation for this discussion, what are the unique kind of data needs for archeological and historical cultural sites for climate adaptation planning? That's a big question. So thank you. Let me see if I can pull this together a bit concisely. One of our biggest challenges is gathering enough observations to understand what's happening to heritage and climate. And actually, I'm not showing my screen anymore. There was a photo that I showed you, initially that had archeology and then a bunch of different forms of heritage. And one of the archeology photo that I showed you is actually an overview of excavations at Jamestown Island of James Fort. And I'm going to use that as my main example. One of our biggest challenges is really understanding the full scale of what climate change is going to be doing to archeology and heritage. And that particular site on Jamestown Island is really interesting because for a long time everyone had thought it had eroded into the James River. We didn't even think it was there. So we know, and then it was found, part of it. So we knew that we were lucky, but we were expecting erosion to be a problem. And there's actually been a seawall there for almost 100 years to help protect, actually more than 100 years now. So it's historic itself to help protect that site. As part of the park service preparations for like the work that Rob Young is doing, there's been also a lot of work with storm surge and hurricanes. So we know, okay, erosion is a problem. We know storm surges are a problem. Those are things that we can see. But one of the other things that has come up from Jamestown Island is that a couple of years ago, staff there recognized that when it rained, this island just wasn't draining very well. And like marsh vegetation that hadn't grown there before was coming up. And what they have realized through work with the USGS is that the groundwater table on the island is actually rising. And not only is the groundwater table rising, it's actually brackish water. And as I understand, they're not sure why, which is basically saturating archaeological sites from the bottom up. And what we're seeing is that while we can see and measure erosion along the side, we can anticipate probability of inundation from the top. What may actually take out most of these sites or make them inaccessible soonest is what we can't say. And that's the saturation from the bottom up. So it's this balance between trying to understand what we can see and not see up in the Arctic. We know that there are sites that are melting literally as permafrost is melting. That's something we can see. But in places like the Southwest, we are now also understanding that the wildfires are so hot and intense that they are literally starting to shatter artifacts and they're baking soils in a way that they haven't before. And that's having effects. We still haven't even wrapped our heads around. So it's figuring out that balance between what we can see and what we can't see, tracking impacts that we know, but also keeping a really creative eye out for the things that we didn't even know to look for before. Whoa. Scared you. Like a lot. Okay. Definitely got your work cut out for you, but it's great work. Very important stuff. One thing kind of along the lines of Rob Young's presentation yesterday and other presentations using like Noah's sea level rights viewer. And other national databases for doing sea level rise analysis. Is there a geo reference national database for these like historic registered. Properties or other important. Cultural historical sites that could be used on a national basis to. Check their vulnerability of sea level rise. Or should there be, or how, what would be the barrier to that happening? Yeah. So that's another really, really good question. So there, there is a national database of all national register sites. So that exists. And I know some colleagues at the national park service have been working on that and particularly cleaning it up because sometimes when the national register has been around for a long time and sometimes the location information for some of the early sites isn't always precise. So they've had to just go back and make sure that it's, it's still really precisely located, but they've been working on cleaning that database. So if something is on the national register, there should be a location known for that. But one of the other. Is that for archeological sites. Their location information is not supposed to be publicly available. So there's a lot of information. It's considered confidential to help protect them. Particularly worried about things like looting, damage to Native American sites and so forth. So that's under, I was looking my head just went blank. I think it's the archeological resources protection act that keeps them, they're not even subject to FOIA. Like you're not supposed to find them. So they are considered confidential. So we would not want, and we cannot create a full database of all of the archeology in the US that would be publicly available. Because that is, that information is specifically restricted. There's some amazing colleagues at the University of Tennessee that have started to figure out a way around that. And they've built some database architecture. That pulls together data from state historic preservation offices. Without copying the data, but it will sort of pull it together and create a map. That has relatively close points and it can, they have used it. I think their paper came out in late 2017. The first one to look at the potential impacts of sea level rise on archeological sites in the Southeast region. So it's not a super fine scale, but it's a really great start to help us just see where things most at risk. And I think they have been trying to grow that database and that ability to pull data together at a larger scale. So there, there are champions in doing that. Fascinating. So cool. Yeah. Marcy, I'm going to ask you a question that came in through email from one of our audience members. This question has to do your presentation dealt mainly, it seems with sort of federal level work. But a lot of this work is done by state agencies. The, the preface of the question is a lot of responsibility for survey and identification of cultural resources lies with state and tribal historic preservation offices. Do you have any thoughts about how survey and mapping by state and tribal historic preservation offices could be improved, whether it's an issue of policy or funding and how that might be used to improve climate, climate change and resilience planning. Yeah. So my, my first response is that I'm sure they need more funding. More funding and staffing is always one of our issues. And I think one of the areas where I, I don't actually have a lot of information. And this would be a question for some of our state colleagues when we have a chance to do it is the extent to which they're able to do research themselves versus managing information that comes in from development projects that are done around the country. So a lot of our knowledge about where heritage is comes from those development projects under the National Historic Preservation Act. And so we're kind of dependent on who wants to build a road or housing project or a pipeline to help us figure out where a lot of things are. I know for the federal government, there's another section of the NHPA that requires federal agencies to inventory all of their holdings. Takes a long time. We're not there yet, but there is that provision there. I don't know how well that functions at the state level and how able they are to really survey across the state. So that's a question for them. And one of the challenges that we had in the park service, and I think this also applies to the state level, is trying to balance care for the places that we already know are there versus looking, continuing to search and look for places that may be at risk. And I'll give you like, for example, in Alaska. There's a huge, there's so much federal lands in Alaska. We haven't surveyed. It's a small, small percentage of it. So we had this question of, okay, we know there's stuff along the coast that's eroding, but we also know there are these, you know, like 95% of the land area in Alaska hasn't been surveyed. So. How do we prioritize even going to look for things that might be at risk? And I expect that same contrast in that issue exists at the state level. Of balancing survey for things that might be risk, but then also understanding the risk to the places that they know. Okay. That's interesting. Thanks. Another question came in. This one came in by Twitter. The person was surprised to see the funding comparisons. We're funding trends between national and cultural resources in the time period that you gave, but it looked like the time period you gave ended. Around 2008. Yeah. And the person asked whether or not there's any more recent data about what that split might look like.  Is it still a problem? Is it a growing problem? Or is it something that. That's changed a little bit since the, since the data that you presented. The, the data that I showed is the most recent data that I was able to find. And so that was, there was a specific, specific report that was done in 2008 that looked at that distribution. So that's what I was pulling from. And there's a reference to that at the bottom of the slide. You want to look at it. So I don't have any additional data from 2008. To now. What I can tell you from my experience at the national park service is that it did not improve substantially there. The actual cultural resources staffing was going down further. While I was there. So I can't give explicit numbers for you, but. It was not, my experience was not that the, the trend was going up. It was actually continuing to go down. Okay. And you were at the national park service through 2018. So just so pretty recently. I was there from 2011 to, you know, great. Thanks. Thanks for that clarification. That was really helpful. Amber. I'm going to put it over to you. I think you might get the last question of the day. Great. So. I guess this kind of. Is more directed towards your work with. Ecomos and IPCC. So what are the lessons that the U.S. can draw from that? International work and which countries are kind of leading the way that we might be able to look at as an example of great. Cultural stewardship and climate adaptation. So what I'll say is there, there is a country that I looked to is being out in the lead. And that country is skyrocketing. They have done a tremendous job in really understanding what the risks are, particularly along their coasts. And Scotland has a lot of coastline. And that small program that I mentioned, Scottish coastal archeology and the problem of erosion or escape. And. Has just done a tremendous job to reach out to not only capture data and really clean data and make really accessible databases of what is at risk and what is most important. And I'll say some of the park service policy on. How to balance or significance and vulnerability is modeled or inspired by some of the things that Scotland did. Scotland has also done some tremendous outreach to the public. And they've done some citizen science work. And they said, look, we've got a whole bunch of coastline. We've got a lot of history and heritage on that coastline. But sort of similar to the US, they do not have a lot of funding to manage that coastline. So they said, three people can't manage all of this. So they basically crowdsourced it and said, okay, public, we're giving you this data. Help us monitor these places. And this is where I should step back and say, Scotland has a very different approach to managing archeological information. They do make it publicly available. We could not do the same citizen science approach here in the states that they've done over there. But seeing how the public has responded to that and watching some of those conversations with them has really been very inspiring. And I know my colleagues at the Florida public archeology network. Have been working very closely with Scotland and trying to draw whatever lessons they can and build them into the public archeology approaches that we have over here. So there's been some great partnerships back and forth. I think on a global scale, the one of the things we are trying to do is say, we've got a lot of information, but we really don't want it to stay at that level of just potential of like, oh, it could be. We really want to get some things going to say, this is how it is useful. This is where we can really make a difference. And that's where really combining. Some of our international connections and then having ECMO service this umbrella because it's got some of the convening capacity. It's existed since 1965. 1965. 1966. So they've had some, they've gravitated. And to say, let's bring this together and make a proposal, which actually we've done. And we're in the process of talking with the IPCC and saying, let's hold, and we'd like to hold an expert meeting on cultural heritage and climate change. And that would be the first step towards an expert meeting on, or sorry, a special report of the IPCC on culture heritage. And that would be the first step towards an expert meeting on, or sorry, a special report of the IPCC on culture heritage. And we think this is a really good time for that. If our current pandemic is showing us anything, it's how important our connections are to each other. And to our stories, and to our place, and to our communities. And that's really what we think we could bring to the climate world and service that connection. So. Yeah. We're always struggling for staff and capacity, but the ability to realize people around the world are having these questions and these concerns. And they have a lot of, and we want to move it forward. It seems like right now we have a pretty good opening to make that happen. Great. Thanks, Marcy. That was a really excellent presentation. And thanks for joining us for some Q and A and answering questions that we came up with and questions that our audience came up with. So thank you very much for that. Absolutely. Thanks also to Amber and Anna McGinn and Dan O'Brien and Aubrey LaPorte and Abby Neal and Sidney O'Shaughnessy and everyone at ESI who's helped pull this briefing series together. Abby and Sidney in particular have been working really hard with Anna's help. They've been working really hard to get these summaries up so quickly. And, and obviously that's really, really important. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you. Great. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, answering questions. So thank you. Thank you everyone for coming out of it so quickly. And and obviously, that's really, really important, so special shout out to them today. Tomorrow, just a quick reminder, we have the fourth of five briefings in the series. Online briefings in the series, So two really great topics coming up. You won't want to miss them. And really, really expert speakers, we've been really lucky this week by the caliber of the experts who have been willing to join us to share these important topics with our audience. So thank you again Marcy, thanks to everyone. Last word, if you are new to ESI, or if you're not, take a moment to sign up for climate change solutions. If you haven't already, it's our newsletter. The last issue dropped yesterday. So every two weeks, you can visit esi.org and sign up for that. And also if you have a few moments to take our survey, Dan O is showing the link to that right now. If you have a moment, it means a lot to us for you to share your thoughts about how this is going in ESI in general. So I'll go ahead and conclude there. Thanks to everyone for joining us. Thanks again to Marcy. I hope everyone has a great rest of your Wednesday. And I hope that you'll join us back here tomorrow at noon for the next installment. Thank you so much everyone.


So you would like to have meaningful and successful self-employment. Well, how do you get started? What are the overall steps? That's what I'm gonna talk about in this video. So I have had 12 years of experience coaching, consulting, thousands of self-employed people by this point. And what I've noticed is that it basically has this arc. There's the, just give you four steps to have as the foundation of how to really get started on the journey of success. So the first step is to choose the right type of business for you. Now, I am biased about this, I am sure, but I think my bias has good reason and I'll see what you think about it. So there are essentially three types of businesses that people get into when they're self-employed. The first type is traditionally when someone says, I'm going to business, maybe not these days, but for hundreds of years say, I'm going into business, that means they set up a brick and mortar store, a retail shop, a restaurant, a yoga studio where they rent out or they lease a space. So a brick and mortar place somewhere people can walk into can feel really meaningful because you get to make your dream space, you get to be in person with your customers and clients all the time and get to really care for them in that kind of way and it feels really meaningful to do that. The problem is that it is extremely risky to do so. If you've known anybody who's started a restaurant, their dream restaurant or the dream store, I just see, I get so sad walking down the street. We have lots of small businesses around here and it's like every couple of years, this store will close, that store will close and I just think that store that closed probably took $100,000 of investment, right? I mean, if you think about the lease, if you think about the equipment that they would have, they need for a brick and mortar place, the furnishings, as well as the local advertisements that are needed to really get enough traffic, local traffic to make a retail store work.  Like, it'd be great, but I think I'm strategic enough to know that I would need $100,000 and at least two years of experimentation, like if I can throw away $100,000 and have no problem with my retirement, I can't, but let's say I've made enough money such that, oh, $100,000, no problem. It doesn't touch into my retirement savings and two years, no problem. I don't need to make money for two years, it's not. If I had that and I had the energy, then I probably would go do a retail store because like I said, it's probably the most meaningful kind of business when it works, when it's successful, okay? So if you have a lot of business experience, if you have $100,000 just to throw away, no problem, and two years, no need to make money, ideally two, three or five years, no need to make profits, then a brick and mortar store is I think the most meaningful type of self-employment assuming that you have enough money to hire people so you don't have to slave over that store, 12 hours a day or something like that. All right, so that's the first type of business. I don't recommend most of you choose it. So stay away from doing a retail store yoga studio included unless it's out of your own home space or unless you're just able to rent like an hour here, an hour there, maybe that's okay. Yeah, that's fine. So the second type of business that people are frequently think of these days is doing a startup. What is a startup?  A startup is usually software related. You create software or an app and you plan to scale it or you have some product that you can manufacture that you have a prototype for and you've already gotten good feedback about it, then you create a startup to scale the distribution of that physical product. So, but these days it's usually a software or an app that means what a startup is. So should you do a startup? It's less risk than starting a restaurant or a yoga studio or a cafe or a boutique shop. It's less risk than a brick and mortar store because a startup is something where it's easier to get investment for it. People tend to be more intrigued by startups and there's less risk because if you get investment for then it's not risking your own money. It's risking someone else's money, which is risk for them. But you have to put together a really nice looking website or a PDF or a Kickstarter campaign that looks really beautifully done and a video, really great demo video. So it costs a lot of money to even get investment, not a lot of money. I should say it costs some skill, design skill essentially and copywriting skill. So if you are already a great designer and copywriter then it will cost you relatively little money to create the page you need to get investment money. Or if you have a co-founder, if you can persuade a friend or two who's good at design and copywriting and the technical ability to actually do the startup. Because you need either the design, the copywriting and the technical yourself or you need to have co-founders who are working for sweat equity, meaning they're not going to take money right away but they'll wait until it's profitable to take the money. So startups are less risky than retail stores but it's still, it's hard to really get it off the ground. So many, most startups fail, not surprisingly. And if you wanna see some promising startups you can go to producthunt.com which is a popular website to check out new startups and new products that could become startups. Producthunt.com, kind of a fun place to look at sometimes. All right, the third type of business to choose which is the one that I have the experience in is really what I consider to be self-employment or being a freelancer, which is basically, and I'm gonna, freelancer these days people think, oh, are you delivering food? Are you on fiverr designing images doing social media for others? That's mainly what a freelancer is. What, and another popular one of course is Uber and Lyft driving, you know, tax, basically taxing around, that's a freelancer, self-employment. All the system is already set up for you. You just have to plug and play, you know? The problem when a system is already set up for you like Uber or Lyft or delivering food or other systems that are all set up for you step by step. Even though it's easy to get into it, the problem is that it's not as meaningful. It's not creative because you're just, you're still working for the man. You are, the man has set up the system and you're kind of employee without much creative direction. Yes, you can set your own hours, but that's about it. Right, so yes, you can make your car look however you want inside, whatever. I mean, it's not that much creative direction, right? So what I recommend for this third type of business is what I call an authentic business. Maybe this is a fourth type, but authentic business, my definition is basically creating a service out of your own passions. What topic, what interest do you have that you just can read about and talk about a lot that energizes you? Or what skill do you love helping other people with? If you could make money doing it, you'd be like, oh, wow, this is so cool. That can make money helping people with this because I really enjoy doing that skill. So what is a passionate topic or an enjoyable skill that you have? You can make a business out of it. That's what I have spent 12 years helping people with. So authentic business is what I call it. Basically, it's an authentic expression of your joy and it's a business because it makes you money. It's your self-employment. So I have, of course, tons of articles and videos on my website about authentic business. So you might go and check it out. I also have a 10-year plan for creating an authentic business. Not that you won't, you'll make money starting the second year, maybe even starting the first year in that 10-year plan. You'll start making money, but 10 years to self to basically semi-retirement where you're just the top of your field, that kind of 10-year plan. So you might wanna check that out. Google 10-year plan, authentic business and you should find it, okay. So that's the first step is choosing the right type of business. And by the way, you can always start with an authentic business, make lots of money and then choose to go into a startup or create a startup because by the time you have success as an authentic business, you have lots of connections now. Now doing a startup makes more sense or now creating, you know, once you make lots of money with a startup, now you can do a brick and mortar. So that actually is a really interesting arc of a business life. It's like starting with an authentic business and then or maybe even starting with a freelancer where the system is all set up for you. So you're not stressed out about money because you're just driving Uber, driving Lyft and you're making regular money and then doing the authentic business on the side, make that successful and then create a startup, make that successful and then start a brick and mortar store where you can hire people and feel so meaningful in the retail environment. So interesting journey. Okay, all right. So that's the first main step is to choose the right kind of business to start with right now. First main step. The second main step is to carve out enough time to work on your authentic business. Now why is this even, why do I need to say this? I see so many people unable to create business success because they're so bad at time management. They're so unskilled at creating boundaries with their family and their friends and their entertainment and themselves with their interests going here, go there. So carving out time is not, it takes practice and it is actually a skill you need to work on. It's not something that comes naturally. Nobody, most of us were not taught good time management for self-employment. Yes, you might have been taught good time management as a student going through school, but that's different because going through school, you had someone to structure most of your days. And at night, you got very clear homework as someone else structured for you. That's not self-employment. That's being in the system. And you might have gotten good time management as an employee, but again, someone else was setting the system for you. You didn't have practice or skill creating your own time and your own structure, your own priorities and saying no to different priorities that, that is a practice. I mean, this is why I'm so passionate to be running a coaching program called TLC, Thoughtful Life Calendar, where the participants are learning how to practicing the skill of wise prioritization for authentic business, setting boundaries, self-care, time management, calendar management, to-do list management, email. That kind of stuff is, I started, I have been, yeah, you could say obsessed about joyful productivity for pretty much all my life. I mean, I started pretty young, really interested in that stuff. And for decades now, I've been practicing and studying productivity. And really for the last 15 years, even before I started this business, I was coaching my friends about productivity. So that's why when I started my business 12 years ago, I was able to get to a full-time income by the end of the first year. Why? Because I was a really good time manager for self-employment already. Most of you that I've seen that I've worked with are not so good at it. You go by other people's systems for you. Even being a parent, let me get this, many of you are parents.  That is a system that society has set up for you. It's not self-employment. Self-employment is very different. It's like you having to choose to have boundaries where if you didn't do anything, nothing bad would happen. It's just that you wouldn't have a business. Do you see what I mean? You have to take it so seriously that setting, carving out time and becoming really good at productivity has to be a foundation if you're going to make self-employment or authentic business work at all.  It's not like being an employee and it's not like going to school. It's very different animal. So carving out time or TLC, Thoughtful Life Calendar is extremely important. The third main foundation, okay, so the first foundation was choosing the right type of business to get into and then saying the others I will not do. Maybe in the future I will choose the right type of business. Second is to get serious about your Thoughtful Life Calendar, your productivity skills. Get serious about it. Get a coach. I don't know, read books, watch YouTube videos but consuming content is not, you have to practice it. So whether you're really good at discipline and practicing it yourself or you get a friend or a coach, that's what it takes to take it seriously. Okay, that's the second foundation. The third foundation is to find an aligned strategy. Okay, so for example, every industry has its own strategy. Okay, and I can't emphasize this enough. Not every strategy, just because someone else is succeeding in doing it is aligned for you. So I think a lot of you are probably watching this video and you follow my content because you know that you've studied other marketing strategies that just don't feel right for your heart. It's so pushy or they are using manipulative persuasion techniques, which I don't use. I can't stomach it. So that's why I can't use it. But anyway, much of the marketing and business out there is very manipulative and persuasion, tactic driven, conversion rate optimization driven. And it's not aligned with my heart. And so therefore, even if I try to do it, I have tried to do it in the past and I crashed and burned because I just, I couldn't sustain it. It was just not right for my conscience. And so you too have to find a strategy for your industry, whatever self-employment you wanna do, whatever authentic business you wanna create, find successful people in the industry and study them and see if they have a mentor to recommend to you and find a strategy that is proven in your industry. Now, there are multiple strategies that are proven. Once you find a strategy that's proven, find another one if you can, see which one is more aligned to your heart, to your conscience, to your values, or at least you have to modify the strategy to align to your values. So an aligned strategy, meaning step by step, what do you do every day? What do you do? What's your year plan? What's your quarterly plan? A month plan? What's your day-to-day plan? That is a strategy. So you have to, that's the third foundation is to know exactly what you're doing every day so that you're not just shooting in the dark. But even within a aligned strategy, even if someone gave you, here are the eight steps I have, for example, the eight practices of authentic business. You might wanna Google that to find it. The eight practices of authentic business is essentially my strategy for lots of you who are creating what I call wisdom-based businesses. Like you are creating coaching or mentoring based on the wisdom you've gained in your life, in your relationships, in your spiritual growth, in your health, et cetera, et cetera. So you can look that up as my aligned strategy, but whatever strategy you find, you still have to experiment a lot to find the right way for yourself. There is no eight-step plan that someone can just hand you and says, do this exactly and you will succeed, okay? Unless you wanna sell your soul. You have to experiment, so okay, even if George says this, let me try it this way, let me try it that way. And you might find your own, you will find your own unique way through. That's very important for an authentic business, especially. Okay, so that's the third foundation. The fourth foundation is joyful productivity. Now, what, the house is different. I realized as I speak this out, I didn't make enough distinction between the second and the fourth foundation. So the second foundation was really about time management. Now, thoughtful life calendar, right? Carving out boundaries with family and friends. The fourth foundation, which is joyful productivity, is how you show up to work on a day-to-day basis. How do you relate to your to-do list, to your calendar? Like, do you resist it? Do you procrastinate? Do you, and also how do you relate? So self-regulation, basically, it's the fourth one, self-regulation and resilience. I call it joyful productivity, but it's essentially self-regulation and resilience skills. So self-regulation is like, yes, you have a great calendar, you have a great to-do list, but do you actually, are you able to regulate your system, your mental health and your emotional health to actually get to work in a joyful, calm, focused way? Or are you overwhelmed and anxious? Well, if you're overwhelmed and anxious, that means you still have some ways to go in practicing joyful productivity. You still have a ways to go in managing this and this. Those are essential. Essentially, to have a successful authentic business that has a good work-life balance, you have to become masters.  You really do. And managing your friends and your family, meaning like, okay, I can't talk to you, right? I can't help you right now. You know, go talk to dad. I can't help. I'm working right now, okay? Or go figure it out yourself. I'll help you in an hour, child, right? Like you have to become so good at doing that. Anyway, so joyful productivity is self-regulation and it's also resilience skills. Resilience skills means, well, as an entrepreneur essentially, as someone who is creating something out of nothing, you're going to have to have a lot of experiments that don't go very successful, you know? And I have a blog post and a video. You can Google this. There is no failure, only redirection. Yeah, so if you Google it, you'll find my video, my motivational video on, there's no failure, only redirection. So that's, I have another video that might interest you. It's called, strict about showing up, gentle, or sorry, strict about showing up, lenient about the results. So Google that, strict about showing up, lenient about the results is how I manage my resilience because many of you don't see all the experiments that I run behind the scenes.  I don't know if anyone is going to like it or find it helpful. I don't, no idea. I'm going to put it out there and see. I mean, by this point, usually a few people, but it's like, is it going to be one of my best videos or one of my worst videos? It could be either one. I'm open to either one because I know with every experiment I can learn something from it. So those are the four foundations. And by the way, those, you know, if you want to, if you go to my website, georgecao.com, G-E-O-R-G-E-K-A-O.com, you'll see my best blog posts about joyful productivity or you can watch my videos about that stuff. So these are the four foundations for successful self-employment. Number one, choosing the right type of business. Number two, carving out enough time to get to work. Number three, having an aligned strategy that is both strategic and also good for your heart. And fourth is joyful productivity, which is self-regulation and resilience. So I hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below. I will try my best to at least give a brief answer to your questions. And until the next video, I wish you joyful productivity as you get to work on your authentic business. Take care, I look forward to your comments.


President Biden, for decades now, every time the Palestinian people have risen up against the 75-year-old brutal Israeli occupation, instead of sympathizing with their plight and seeking a real solution, you have reiterated your rock-solid support for their oppressor. Genocide Joe Biden, in these last terrifying three months, when we have witnessed the over 10,000 precious Palestinian children when we have heard their soul-wrenching cries trapped in the rubble, instead of demanding that Israel immediately stop this atrocity, you bypass Congress to send more weapons.


War isn't like anything else and war isn't like it is on TV. I don't think it's really possible to communicate. And even just how an event in a war can affect different people, you know, I make the cups to start conversations. My name is Aaron Tull, I'm a veteran of the 91 Gulf War. I've made and given away more than 21,000 cups since 2001. I joined the Marine Corps in 89 and I thought I wanted to be a cop to protect and serve. I went to military police, graduated the top of my class. We did convoy escorts and enemy prisoner of war handling.  It's like, Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad. One, two, three, Baghdad, Baghdad. Eventually I figured out that he had three children in Baghdad and I said that out loud to the Marine next to me. I said, oh, he's got three kids in Baghdad and my buddy said Hiroshima Nagasaki, Hiroshima Nagasaki all gone and that guy dropped like we shot him. He just crumpled and just sobbed, just uncontrollably sobbed. And at the time I didn't know, maybe we had moved to Baghdad but anyway, it just really, it kind of undermined the argument of they hate freedom or they hate us. You know, this guy was just concerned about his three kids in Baghdad and so that messed with me and I decided I didn't want to be a gunslinger anymore. I got out of the Marine Corps, I took the GI Bill. I went to art school and I took a drawing class just as a whim kind of thing. But that instructor, Ben Sakaguchi, was Japanese-American. He said all arts political and that really resonated with me. Decorating the cups initially I started with, you know, my own insignia and my father's insignia. As it went on, you know, I'd borrow other people's insignia and toys, like the gas mask that I wore during the 1991 Gulf War, G.I. Joe made a version of it. You know, the collection just keeps growing. All the images mean something to me and they're emotional for me. So you can't really be thinking about too many other things when you're throwing the stamping. Then you can get lost in all kinds of crazy conversations in your head. There are times I cry in the middle of my doesn't making cups. But I feel like making the cups is something that I really need to do. It's a desire to serve. My father didn't talk to me about his experience in Vietnam. My grandfather didn't talk to me about his experiences in World War II until I came back from my war. You know, it's impossible to communicate so it feels easier just not to talk about it at all. Most of the requests come from vets or their families. People will just cold, like, email me and ask me to make a cup for their brother who committed suicide or their son who's having a hard time. The real payoff is being able to hand somebody the cup and have their reaction. It's a little message in a bottle that I get to throw out there. I gave cups to people and they were crying so bad they almost dropped the cup, you know. And there were, you know, hearing stories afterwards, like a woman who maybe had a hard relationship with her father. You know, I made the cup for them and she took the cup back to the father and then they had this conversation. The daughter got a new insight into her father and what his experience must have been like. It's priceless the opportunity to have these conversations. Yeah, I want you to get done messing with it. I mean, keep messing with it and we'll fix it at the end. I work in the ceramics lab here at UC Berkeley. I think that a lot of what's causing problems in the world is ignorance. And so at Berkeley you get exposed to so many things. The conversation is here. All you gotta do is listen. There's something about the Marine Corps that I try to bring to teaching and try to bring working here that, you know, we are all in it together and, you know, everybody's perspective is important. Working at Berkeley has been great for that. I say I just make cups and part of that is a self-defense thing that I don't want to say that the cups are these grand and noble things that are changing the world. And then find out that they're just cups. So I'd rather just say they're cups and if they're anything more, that's great. But if they are anything more, it's not because of me. It's not because of the way they're made. It's because they resonate with somebody else. There's still Marines out there in combat in harm's way and it's hard for me to ignore that. I don't believe anything I do is going to change the world but nothing in the world leasing me from my obligation to try.