Over there and over here.
OK.
Yes, hello, Ms. Damon.
Thank you for coming to speak with us, everyone.
I did have a question regarding marrying science and art.
I think that that is marrying objectivity and subjectivity.
And I was wondering, I know that keepers of the water
is what you use to evolve your ideas and your artistic views.
But do you ever find that your artwork is perhaps disinterpreting?
I know that that's difficult, but with this objectivity
and having your own respect.
Does it ever not come across properly in the way that you would have it?
Well, I don't think too often.
I mean, and maybe to the people that it does, they don't tell me.
Like, I only hear from the people who really like it.
So, you know, I really don't know.
But I don't know.
I try and stay away from too much woo oneness.
I don't think praying over water.
And I don't go there in any lectures and all that stuff.
So, I mean, water is probably that sensitive,
but I don't think it makes a big difference.
I think you're more likely to get the science misinterpreted than the art.
In some sense, well, science is meant to give you an answer, right?
And it's amazing how people will take the science
and twist it around to give them the answer that they want.
At least with art, you don't pretend you're providing any answers, I don't think.
Oh, you'd be surprised if people think my art.
They're like, you have to come to our town and help us clean up our river.
I'm like, clean up your own river.
I mean, everywhere, people are like, you should do this
and you should do that to India and all over the world.
I mean, no, I don't have a company.
I'm 70.
I don't want a company.
The reason I don't want a company is actually
I want to be free to do a little artwork now and then.
And also, you know, what's amazing is my main job is to provide hope.
The only reason people don't do this is they're hopeless.
River cleaning and all this stuff is not a rocket science.
You're not building a rocket ship to the moon, all right?
You're not even, it's almost logical.
So my message is why don't we do this?
We know how to do it.
We know it needs to be done and we don't do it.
So what in the human condition is keeping people from doing it?
No, it's not money.
It's not money.
No, it's hopelessness.
It's just plain hopelessness.
Being beat down, troked down, said your duty,
said that you can't do it.
What?
I disagree.
And I think one of the things that you bring to the projects
that you have shown on your website is that by working on a project
where you're unembarrassed to do what we as scientists would be embarrassed to do,
which is to make beauty or to highlight beauty or to focus on expressiveness,
that allows people to be hopeful in a way that when we just tell everybody
to put on their oldest clothes and be prepared for how awful and sticky
and miserable it is and go out and clean it up,
instead of making it a negative action, through bringing art to it,
you make it a positive action.
And that's an important part of changing how we perceive what we're doing.
Okay.
I take that.
That's great.
So there.
That's true.
Well, that's true.
And the cleanups I do, you always make sculpture,
and that always means to clean up as twice as good as it would be.
It's totally true.
She's right.
I'm sorry.
I just wanted to comment between your conversation at dinner and your conversation here.
We got a plastic and big oil is like the reason why we still have plastic bottles,
because they like dominate our economy.
And you're saying that water isn't about money and our disconnection from,
I mean, our disconnection from water can be brought into just our disconnection
from the earth in general, because that's what capitalism does.
That's what it does.
That's the capitalist enterprise.
So I guess what I'm looking for, I don't know if I'm just offering a comment
or if I'm looking for a response, as to the ways in which our capitalist lifestyles
are extremely and directly influencing the denigration of the earth.
I mean, I don't want to buy food from places.
I want to be sufficient.
I'm growing a garden in my tiny, tiny apartment and I have pots of lettuce.
And it's great.
It's fantastic.
I had pansies growing.
One night they were this big.
The next night they were this big.
And I had never seen that before because people don't grow stuff.
People just buy stuff.
People don't clean stuff.
They pay someone else to clean it.
So I don't know if I'm looking for a response to this,
but the medium of money has completely, to me it seems, just severed,
especially in the United States, like our relationship to the earth.
And we depend on the earth for everything.
And once it's gone.
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute.
I'm just playing devil's advocate.
As a working woman, I don't have time to grow my own lettuce.
And I'm really, really glad that there's a thing called money that I can use
to pay somebody to clean my toilets.
And I can pay somebody to grow my food and stuff.
Because if I was still trying to do it.
No, that's off the point.
Let's get back on the point of what she's saying.
But what I'm saying is that there's, I mean, there's a,
I don't think, I think it's a little bit too easy to say
capitalism is the problem and big oil companies are the problem.
I think that's a little too easy.
Yes, but it's not to, go ahead.
I mean, I'm kind of, I call it between two.
I think in some cases that is the issue,
but there's also so many other factors that will come into play
when it comes to taking down the dam or cleaning.
You know, there's, people live in those areas now.
You know, you can't just flood an area or, you know, the levees are bad.
And Mississippi River is held up.
They can turn the Mississippi River on and off.
Which, you know, they did during the oil spill to stop the,
they turned it back on to stop the oil from coming in.
And, you know, the fact that we can do that is incredible,
but you can't just take it down now because there's a lot of communities and people,
and they could be all growing their own gardens in that area.
And, you know, you know, so there's people that live, that care for the earth,
but are still dependent on our society as it is now.
And you can't just say, we can't do any of what we're doing anymore.
We've got to cut it all down.
Well, this is how I think about it, is that you live in the United States.
The United States is the most inequitable, has taken capitalism to extremes
that it was never supposed to have conceived of, right?
And it's, so we have extremes of poverty.
And part of the reasons for all this are, well, there's just incredible inequity.
Like, this is what revolutions are made about.
The world has gone through revolutions to redistribute well, all right?
So, now, in the United States, that's like a totally dirty word now.
And we all know rich don't redistribute their own well.
Okay, that doesn't happen.
And this has happened in my lifetime.
I've seen it.
I'm 70 this year.
So, I've seen what happened, you know, when they took away the estate tax,
when they took away these tax.
I've seen what happened in the 80s when the whole economic system actually changed in this country.
So, you're younger, a lot younger than I am.
And, you know, mega farms have taken over.
And we pay, we subsidize these huge industries, oil, mega farms, and all that kind of stuff.
So, and that has to, all that has to stop.
That has to stop.
And all that kind of stuff has to stop.
Since everything's global, workers need a unified salary based on something on local currency.
But there's all kinds of things that need to change.
Plus, every industry has to factor in how much they extract from the earth into their total accounting.
Which is done now in some places and not in others.
So, rather than, you know, and taking back local economies is going to help.
Going local will help.
Can you, let me just follow up on what I was saying.
I just get concerned that people have this thought in their heads that somehow we're all going to go back to nature.
And we're going to be able to live this life that has no footprint.
And the fact of the matter is, even when we are hunter-gatherers, humans affect their environment.
There's six billion of us.
You cannot support six billion people on this planet without a petrochemical industry.
You can't grow enough food for all those people without tractors and stuff.
It's just not doable.
And so, I want to see us move to a place that's more sustainable, that's more green.
But I know that we're never going to get back to this Garden of Eden thing.
And so, it frustrates me sometimes because I think people are unrealistic sometimes about what's doable and what's not.
Did you want to answer that?
I actually agree with you in many ways.
I want to make sure people can hear you in the back.
Yeah, go for it.
I actually agree with that in a lot of levels partially because I just like capitalism.
But anyway.
No, you don't.
Hey, I'm being powerful now.
So yes, but I would also like to say that despite our views of capitalism,
I do think that they're a little left over from the past because more and more,
I know that I come from a rather privileged area.
I do have the luck of having like a yard.
And I also was lucky enough, my parents are vegetarian.
I'm vegetarian.
They've been caring about the Earth since the 80s, et cetera, et cetera.
So I do come from that background.
But more and more people from backgrounds that are not necessarily steeped in that kind of thing
are bringing gardens back because they're also making it a family project because my mom works.
She works 15 hours a day, you know, but she used me.
Like I was the gardener of the family.
She would give me instructions and then I would do it because I would come home from school at four or five.
And then I had that time.
So I think if you make it more of a community-based project,
which is hard because as you were saying, we don't really have communities anymore.
But I think it's fixable.
That's good.
But on the other hand, like, I like how those...
Well, you're raising a really interesting issue about gender, which we really haven't addressed.
And that is, I mean, if you think about the duplication of everything in all our individual households, you know,
we all have to own vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and irons.
And we all have to have those plastic bags and lettuce.
It's the same thing in every house and every house is so little that's done collectively.
And if we did more collectively, we would probably reduce our footprint.
And it's also, of course, it's a gender issue because it's women who are maintaining these households.
So, I mean, one question I wanted to ask the three of you is where you see gender in this picture.
And here we're talking about sort of light and capitalism, even.
Is it relevant?
Part of what I was trying to say is that, you know, I think in this capitalist society,
women have a lot more freedoms than they do in a lot of other societies.
There are a lot of countries in the world where women can't drive and they can't vote
and they can't, you know, do a lot of these things.
And I feel very lucky in a sense that I live in a place where I, you know, I'm a single mom
and I bought my own house and I can, you know, I can do pretty much whatever I want
and nobody can tell me that it's illegal or whatever.
And I think if you look at the prosperity of a society, generally women's rights are roughly correlated with that.
But the more prosperous the society is, the more women have rights to do the things that they want to do.
So, it's a two-edged sword, you know.
I'm not saying that there aren't excesses to capitalism.
I'm not saying that the U.S. is a terrific system.
There's a lot of things wrong with it.
But my parents lived for a while in Vienna.
Of course, this was about 15 years ago, but my mother, when she was living in Vienna,
she was going crazy because she had worked all of her life.
And in Vienna, the stores closed at five o'clock.
So, the only way you went to the store is if you had the stay-at-home mom
who could go to the store when the guy was working, because the stores just weren't open.
So, you know, there is a place for society
and the gains that we've made through capitalism are not all bad, especially in terms of women.
