Disability and Climate Justice, Accessible Climate Strategies, and Managing Burnout with Alex Ghenis

Laura and Nic interview Alex Ghenis, CEO and Principal Consultant at Accessible Climate Strategies, to explore the intersection of disability and climate justice, accessible climate planning, and the importance of ensuring everyone has a seat at the table. From disaster preparedness and climate resilience to advocacy, burnout, and building more inclusive communities, Alex shares how thoughtful engagement can create meaningful change for people with disabilities in a changing climate.

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Guest Bio:
Alex Ghenis is the founder and Principal Consultant at Accessible Climate Strategies, the nation’s only consulting firm focused entirely on the intersection of disability and climate change. He began addressing disability climate justice in 2014 at the World Institute on Disability and has held other positions at Sustain Our Abilities and Climate Hive. Alex founded Accessible Climate Strategies in 2020 to better analyze disproportionate impacts and support disability-forward climate action. More info is available at www.accessibleclimate.com.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental nerds, Nic and Laura. On today's episode, we talk about having a seat at the table. We interview Alex Ghenis about disability and climate justice, accessible climate strategies, and managing burnout.

And finally, here are some fun facts on beavers, beavers' teeth. First one's on beavers' teeth. Yep, there it is. Beavers' teeth get their distinctive orange color from an iron-rich enamel coating, because the softer inner tissue wears away faster than the enamel, the teeth develop a naturally chiseled shape, perfectly for cutting through wood. They actually do eat the wood. What's that? Oh, they, they totally do, yeah. They store branches on the muddy and pond floor beneath their lodges to snack on during the winter. The cool water acts like a refrigerator, keeping it fresh and preserving the nutrients. OK, that is definitely a fact I did not know. And lastly, beavers can hold their breath around 6 to 8 minutes, and thanks to their webbed hind feet and their flat rudder-like tails, they can swim up to 6 MPH. That's very slow. That doesn't feel fast at all. I feel like every time we talk about animals, it's like hippos can run 30 miles an hour. You're like, what? That can't be right. Is that right? 6 miles an hour? Well, they're not gonna win any championships anytime soon, but they do eat wood. Yeah, that's it, 6 miles an hour. All right, get faster, guys. That's all I gotta tell you. They are impressive otherwise. Hit that music.

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Let's get to our segment. So, you know, we, we had a good interview with Alex Ghenis and it was great. It was really enjoyable, um, and like my number one takeaway from it, you know, we talked a lot about disability and climate and how those things go hand in hand, and sometimes it's just literally not thinking about something that of course makes absolute sense and everyone's on board for it, but he mentioned the idea of like he's on a board and while he's on this board, he has the voice to say, hey, you know, have you thought about, you know, access ramps and stuff like that. Um, and it made me think about something. This happens on a small scale as well, right? When you have someone in an office and who's vegetarian as part of the planning committee, so that when you have meals that come through, you have somebody who's saying, hey, don't forget that onions aren't a meal. So it made me think about being present, having a seat at the table, and why that's so important. And I don't think it's actually something we've talked a whole lot about.

I think it was one of the, the great parts about having Alex on is he touches that, you know, specifically from a disability lens, but it also applies to lots of other things too. Having a voice, having a seat at the table is really impactful, and I know you've seen that in your career as well. I've got a story that I shared with Alex after the interview that I'll share with you, but I'm curious, like how have you seen that in action over your career?

Yeah, that's super important, and I think you see varying levels of intention. It has to be intentional is the thing, and I think sometimes it's anytime you're doing something like an event or hosting multiple events, it, it's easy to get focused on, you know, get the caterer, get the thing, do the thing, and the cost and budget, and to just, like you said, I think you mentioned just. You don't think about it. No, unless someone at the table says, hey, we didn't think about it, but I think it's backing up into ensuring that whatever you're doing is aligned with whatever values and pillars and mission that you've set for yourself. So if you've excluded that from the beginning, you're likely gonna continue to exclude it. So, the first thing is going back and checking, do we have diversity, inclusion access all into built into what we do to begin with.

Yeah, and it's funny, I have a story from like my Early days where, you know, my one of my bosses was hearing impaired and had hearing aids, but, you know, still hearing impaired and I think maybe 7 years into me being there and maybe much longer than that for him because he's, you know, he's been in a career for 20 years. The office was like, Oh, hey, we should put a light in your office for when there's a fire alarm. And everyone, once we figured that out, was like, Oh yeah, that makes a ton of sense, because he's not necessarily going to hear it. The same way that we would, of course he should get a light that flashes in his office, but no one had thought about it and no one had bothered to ask him what he would do in this situation, um, and so it ended up being a thing that was done and I wish I could say exactly how it happened, but I think the idea of it is right there.

It's like nobody thought about it, so nobody did anything. And it's so easy to be like, well, we've got all, all of our bases covered. If you take a moment to think about, like you said, what your event is, what you're trying to accomplish, and thinking about how it will be received by others, and it's not just people that you have something in common with, but even people who are interested that might, you. I have very little in common with. It's a really hard thing to do, but it's like you have to be open to it. It's kind of how I see it. You have to have some experience, right? Cause if you're just doing an event for the first time, it's definitely not the first thing you're going to think of, you're just going to think about putting on the good event, but you don't realize that that also means making it accessible.

Yeah, I, I think I am seeing it more though, like I just went to this conference in Chicago for film festivals and They had an app that if you needed captions, you could just log into and I guess it was live real time translating people talking so that you could actually get the captions without the translator, which for me has always been in an event you want a translator, you want someone who can do sign, but they're sometimes expensive or not easy to find. If you have a volunteer, someone who will do it, great. I think though that it feels like it's getting a little bit better. Like, I just went to this conference in Chicago and they had this app where people could QR code into it, and I think it was real time translating what people were saying, right, live there. So there was a QR code on all the doors and they would announce it at the beginning.

And, you know, I don't like the idea that the person, there has to be someone at the table. Like, they should, they should be at the table whether they're physically there or not, you know. I agree. And the light thing, like that should just be everywhere. What if you have people from the public in the building who are also deaf, like, not just putting it in Jeff's office because he's the one person who might need it, um, and it's extra costs and whatever. But if we're talking about being marginal, though, it's so right, yeah. And even websites, I think I don't know if a lot of people realize that websites have very strict ADA rules. And you're supposed to have, you know, text that the fonts colors are very different than the background, so they're readable images are supposed to have descriptions so that if I'm only reading it, and I'm visually impaired, I'm just someone or something is reading it to me, it makes sense. And it takes extra effort, but it's required and it's important.

It's like, uh, that's what 508 compliance is when you pull together a, a document for the public that in our business, in our line, that is one way we did not used to do that at all. It can be frustrating, but it's like it's not for you and it's not the reason why we do it. But you're totally right. That's actually, I was really hoping you would say that because I think it's frustrating that you have to have a seat at the table sometimes to be heard. But I do think the more we talk about things like this, the more like we have this interview, people will start to say, oh yeah, of course we should think about these kinds of things, not just here but everywhere. So that's a really good one. And you know, this is a good use of AI I think probably just Saying here are the things that we do, what are we missing? Right, and, and I, I don't know if AI is biased in that way yet or not or how, what it would come back with. I'm actually very curious now. So that's homework. All right, awesome. Love when we give the audience some homework. There we go. Let's get to our interview.

Hello and welcome back to EPR. Today we're joined by Alex Ghenis, CEO and principal consultant at Accessible Climate Strategies. Alex, thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, thanks, Nic. Happy to be here.

So you do wear a lot of different hats, right? Uh apology, specialist, educator, writer, advocate, and your work focuses on the intersection of disability and climate change. That's an awful lot of things. So how do you get to this space? What's important to you about this space, and then we'll dive into more of your background.

Yeah, so I have a spinal cord injury. When I was a teenager, I had a cycling accident. So I've, my whole adult life has been having a disability, the lived experience of disability. And I came of age kind of soon after Al Gore's, you know, The Inconvenient Truth An Inconvenient Truth came out and was very interested in climate change, actually went from political science to geography, studying climate change, did some renewable energy work, and was doing policy filings for the California Energy Storage Alliance, and then just kind of a light bulb went off. That, hey, I charge my wheelchair at night and we've got all this solar going on the grid, and there's a connection here, and I started looking up disability and climate change and didn't find anything, so that was about 2014, and I just started writing about it, started a blog, and then, uh, kind of just went through the motions of a career since then, you know I worked at a, Nonprofit, the World Institute on Disability, doing pretty much all of their disability and climate change work, and then in 2020, right at the start of the pandemic decided, you know, I think consulting is probably more needed in this space right now.

There's so many different players that are working on climate policy, on climate planning, on disability related. Work and advocacy, and I want to, you know, help them maximize their impact. So that's why I started Accessible Climate Strategies. Part of my lived experience of disability has been kind of some unfortunate health spurts these last 5 years. Um, I think a lot of people with disability are not run through, run into that in their career. So that slowed me down a little bit, but just in the past. A year and a half I've been working with a few different folks on kind of some more expansion, business development, and landing on disability and climate trainings as one of our main products.

I think this is such an important space because people with disabilities, depending on the stat that you look at, right, there's a lot of different definitions of disability. The Census Bureau uses kind of a mechanized way that. They look at disability, but there was a CDC report that said something like 28% of all adults have a disability, some sort of a disability. Um, we've been largely left out of climate justice conversations and climate related planning, so that's why I think it's important, and then I've always tried to take a very intersectional approach to it because I've found that there are a growing number of disability and climate advocates. I think that's. Incredibly important, most folks are focused on disaster readiness, and, you know, we're disproportionately impacted by disasters, inclusive, accessible disaster readiness and recovery is incredibly important, but I think things like urban design, smart urbanism that's sustainable and supports independent living, looking at migration impacts and policy. Um, that we kind of need to take a little bit of a, a step back and expand the view, so I wanna fill. That what I've seen is more of a missing part right there, and it's important because it's a, it's a group that's disproportionately low income that has various impairments, that's just incredibly marginalized, uh, isn't included in planning and largely doesn't have a seat at the table, um, so we need to change all of that. That's what I'm trying to do.

So how do you go from, because I can imagine if you're looking something up and you're like, where is, you know, you're talking about like looking up disability and climate change and finding nothing. Like that's got to be frustrating. That has to be like, you're like, uh, this, of course there isn't anything. So you go from frustration to action. It seems like you just like the way you described it, it was just like what you did, but like, is there a moment where you have to kind of recollect like, OK, of course there isn't anything, I'll change that. That is a really strong thing to do. Like what gave you the motivation to do it? Something like that.

I've always liked writing. Um, so I wrote for a disability magazine. It was Life in Action, uh, the publication of United Spinal Association now. Their magazine is a new mobility magazine, and I still write for them, just assorted articles on kind of wheelchair life. Working at the California Energy Storage Alliance, I was doing a lot of policy writing. I like to joke that I use voice dictation software and I just like the sound of my own voice. Um, so I, but I just said this is interesting to me. I want to write about it, and hey, why not have a blog? Why not use this medium to educate people and People reached out to me and then all of a sudden it was kind of that joy of feeling like I was having an impact. And also you, I think you mentioned, you know, Alex, you're an advocate. I was throughout college and then even after I was very involved just in disability advocacy, um, and I just kind of viewed this writing and education as an extension of that, that happened to use a blog as a medium.

Yeah, and it's gotta be really rewarding too to come into something. Start working on it and then see it build into, you know, ACS and what you're doing here. So it's like, what would you tell kind of maybe is your like your biggest successes in this space. It doesn't necessarily have to be with ACS, but what do you see as like where you have made the most impact?

Oh boy, I know. Yeah, I have different answers for different things, right, but I think on the one hand there was a paper that I did with the late Doctor Marcia Saxton while I was at WID and we were both at WI, that's disability and climate change intersections, and I should have this, the name of this memorized, um, but you know, I get notifications from academia.edu which has that article referenced and were referenced all the time. And just knowing that, you know, this was a, in many ways kind of a foundational piece for disability and climate literature has been really fulfilling, otherwise just, Hearing people say that, oh this is interesting, I'm also going to launch my own efforts around disability and climate change. I just got somebody from Nepal who reached out to me on LinkedIn, uh, recently, and, you know, he has a spinal cord injury and he was interested in addressing this there and wanted to talk about approaches. And then there's, I've done trainings for functional assessment service teams in California. That deploy out to disaster shelters, do assessments to uh coordinate accommodations, and I'm just one of those team members, but knowing that, I think that's probably the biggest on the ground impact that I've had is training people to go out to disaster shelters and, Coordinate accommodations. So that was 3 things you asked about what's the one, but that's kind of the things in the different buckets, right?

No, that's, that's wonderful, and it's gotta be like, it's already like disasters by themselves are already harrowing, right? I can't imagine having another layer on top of just, I've done some work in that space as well. And you know, tornadoes, for example, they're brutally inconsistent, you know, like I saw an entire community get destroyed except for one house, which is totally fine and it doesn't make any sense. Like they, they have like some windows that are broken and everything else is fine, but there's no other homes standing, and even that by itself is hard. So I mean, do you ever approach something like that, like this is impossible. How the heck am I even going to take one step forward, you know, how do you do any of this? How do you manage just getting. In front of people.

I've always approached every bit of activism with each incremental benefit. One marginal benefit for one marginal person for one marginal moment is worthwhile, so. If one city can have better disaster planning, and it makes it so that the alerts are more accessible, that they use multi-modal alerts, and that they actually reach out to local independent living centers and the disability community and train people with disabilities on how to understand incoming thunderstorms and Whatever dangerous might be with supercells is, and then one of those houses that was destroyed, that that's the house of one person with a disability that got saved, then, you know, that's incredible, um, and maybe a year's amount of work results in one or two of those moments, and that's tremendous. Um, and you just kind of have to keep going with that, but the smaller victories are still really worthwhile. I'm trying to think of what the smaller, smaller victories are, but they're, they're not quite there in my head right now.

No, no worries at all. And doing these kinds of things where you're doing a lot of training on. This coming on a show like this talking to us about something that I'm sure people may think of, but many people may not, who are your targets for this? Is it agencies? Is it individuals? Is it everyone? And what do you hope they gain from hearing things like we're talking about on the show?

It's a good question. In many ways the answer is all of the above, and I think that's the beauty of doing such an intersectional topic, right? But let's take the trainings, so I was part of kind of a accelerator matching people with job seekers sort of program, which is It was climate base and this was kind of my main project. Several other people in climate base had disabilities and said, Wow, I'm happy that somebody is doing this. I want to be on board. So we did a survey of assorted stakeholders and Came up with these trainings, a half day training, a full day training, a 2 day training on disability and climate change with, you know, around 12 segments for each training.

And our ICP it is very broad, but it includes state and local government, where the state government is the types of agencies that touch either disability, regional development, public health, or disaster management. Same thing with departments and actual individual stakeholders in local government, and then on the kind of nonprofits and professionals side of things. Disability nonprofits, climate justice nonprofits, just climate nonprofits in general, folks that are working on environmental issues and want to figure out how to best reach out to the disability community, to bring people on board to speak the language of the disability community, to kind of expand their volunteer base, to expand their potential employee base. Right, to bring in this kind of lived experience and this unique knowledge that people with disabilities have to improve and amplify their teams, so we're doing that, you know, we're in discussions with a couple of state agencies for these trainings. Um, as well as climate justice nonprofit, and then for reaching out to individuals, folks at a developmental disability nonprofit, coming on board for kind of one of these, you know, groups of individuals getting professional certificates, kind of thing, and folks from a couple of environmental nonprofits were the ones that we brought on board, but it's, it's very broad and we just touch so many different. Things that we think it's important for people to come and learn and ultimately, I think our goal is to train folks, but to empower stakeholders to build coalitions and have conversations among different groups, because you need everybody on board to safeguard the well-being of people with disabilities during climate change.

Yeah, and you know it's, it's interesting, you know, we're talking about, I mean, like you said at the beginning. There's lots of different kinds of disabilities or different needs that people have, so this has to be a pretty multifaceted approach. Like you can't just come in and say, well, you know, we need ramps for wheelchairs, we're done, right? That's not obviously not, not good enough. Do you ever have challenges with people saying, well, we can do one thing, we can't do another, or, you know, like it's great that you want all this. Stuff, but we can only do so much. Do you have any pushback or any challenges with trying to bring, you know, people with disabilities to the climate space? Do you have issues like that?

Not really, and I think if people say, you know, we can only do so much, and I say that that's fine. We have this conceptual grid. Of one column of climate issues on one side and one column of disability considerations on the other, different types of disabilities, aspects of independent living, medical needs, um, reliance on social services, disability identity, disability pride, just any of those things, and then on, on the climate space, impacts mitigation, resilience, and You know you could easily populate those if you want to expand them out to 100 rows each, connect with a bunch of horizontal and diagonal lines and have 10,000 connections, and I say, hey, if you're tackling one of those lines, you're tackling part of disability and climate change. You just then have to figure out, hey, all right, well we could do a bigger project where I talk with someone that's on one of those other lines, and we work together. And I'm still in my wheelhouse, but we're building a team here to make a difference.

So do you ever think that, uh, I mean, do people come to you with misconceptions on what you would even be asking of them? Is it Oh, this will cost too much, or you're asking for the moon, or do people kind of come with an open mind? I mean, sometimes I love being surprised by people's, you know, I think sometimes we hear nothing but negativity and you know, generosity is very common, it's just not often talked about. So do you get people who come with misconceptions or do you get people who are more likely to say, OK, yeah, let's just keep talking, let's keep going.

It really depends on, I don't think we go to anybody with an ask that they don't think is feasible, um, but also so much of making a difference here is free. It's, you know, adding a dedicated spot for someone with a disability on. A state commission, find some disability professional that can speak to at least part of this. I'm grateful that a connection that I made, you know, almost a decade ago, recommended me to be on the technical advisory committee for California's integrated climate adaptation and resiliency program, and there's, it's a varied group with a bunch of, Different skill sets and there's other people that work in climate justice, but things come up and I think I make contributions that other people wouldn't have thought about, but that they nod along with, and so many other people with disabilities have that capacity.

At independent living centers around the country, there are folks where either their part or their full-time job is doing emergency preparedness work for the disability community. If a county has, A climate adaptation advisory council, then she would reach out to that independent living center and see if anybody there is, you know, knowledgeable enough to be on board and can bring that disability perspective, so, and then, you know, people come to me and say we're interested in doing this and help us with it. I'll be honest, we want to grow our customer base and the number of the number of people that are coming and saying that, um, we want to help people. Achieve goals that they already have in mind. I really like the idea of being a subcontractor on grant funded projects, where the grant funded project was addressing climate justice, and we come on board as an advisor, you know, someone that can help them weave disability into that, make a more appealing proposal to the grant maker, and then make a bigger difference for the community.

So, is that how you typically get like those, that's how you get your projects. Is it through grant writing? Is it through finding companies that are engaged or agencies that are interested in being engaged? Like how do you, how do you find a guy? So you wanna work in some space, you want to build this program out. What are you doing to do that?

Well, I've been working with Kevin Drillet from a Climate Hive, which is a a just a biz dev. Well, I co-founded it with him and I do some client resource development. I'm the director of content over there, so yeah, I wear, you were saying I wear a few different hats. That's one of the hats that I'm wearing right now. Yeah, uh, but, um, Kevin is really good just at helping to reach people through LinkedIn, helping to just Maximize our visibility and not even necessarily go and do an introductory message and say, hey, we see that you're doing this, let me tell you how we can, exactly how we can weave disability into it. Uh we always open with the question, hi, have you thought about disability and climate change before? Uh, would you like to have a discussion about it, and it's not a, a heavy sales pitch or anything like that, it's just, this is a topic that you might have thought about before, otherwise we think it's important, let's have a conversation, keep us in mind. We understand that not every client or potential client has something immediately on board that we'd be able to help with. Um, when I was at the World Institute on Disability, I understood that at least in the nonprofit space, you have your grand idea. and some of that work is funded through general donations and we had generous donors there, but otherwise you kind of, you go where the money is, right? Um, so when we did, but when we did a transportation project, we tried to really weave the climate narrative into that disability and transportation project and then so that we'll say, hey, you've got a transportation project, you know, tap us when bring in, I don't want to say rhetoric, that narrative.

Yeah, I mean, but like you said, it's, it's great to have a voice and be able to put it out in space, right? Like there's a lot of times where, like you say, if you're not on a council and you're not able to say, have you guys thought about, you know, maybe doing a little bit this a little bit differently for, for me, you know, even, even just having that voice, getting into a room is great, and I guess my question is really. You're on a board through your network, right? How do you get on other boards? How do you amplify your voice so people, more people are paying attention?

Well, first, I think I respect my own time and don't try to overextend myself, uh, really, as I'm, as I'm here. And at one point in my career I definitely dealt with burnout. Really just try to impart to everybody at whatever stage in their career, you know, respect to your well-being, um, and do what you need to practice that mindfulness to make sure that, you know, you check in with yourself and, and you're not going too far. So that being said, I haven't really pitched myself for any. I don't like, I don't like that idea. I haven't been there so much before. I would have to go back years probably since I've pitched myself for a board. What I like doing is saying, hey, I know this person, and bring them on board. I would rather recommend somebody to something also where I know that they might be a more insightful person for that.

When I was. Talking about taking a broad approach to disability and climate change, I like what I'm able to do on the, so integrated Climate Adaptation and resiliency council or program ICARP. I'll say ICARP a couple of times here on the ICARP advisory council, because I try to take that broad view and because ICARP takes a very broad view to climate resilience and adaptation in California, but if there was something that was very specifically disaster readiness, I'd probably point to, uh, like Vance Taylor, who's the chief of access and functional needs in the governor's Office of Emergency Services. Right, or some of the many other contacts that I have that work in the disaster space. I only want to go where I think I could make as good or more of an impact than anybody else in my Rolodex. Otherwise I'll, I'll point to them and I'd probably still say, hey, I also consider this person, even if I'm not on board.

No, and that's, that's a great answer, and I appreciate the insight because it's so easy to think that you have to do everything and it's so much smarter to kind of take the time to realize you can't, um, but one of the things that I think, um, you touched on at the beginning as well was about being a writer and you like to write, you're running a newsletter as well, you're doing all of this writing, so. Has that always been a passion of yours, and is that what kind of plays a major role in you making these connections in the climate space?

Yes, and I had to put that newsletter on hold for a little bit. I'm looking forward after kind of all of this, this year of BizDev for ACS to getting back to that. That newsletter was disability YIMB, so yes, in my backyard and disability. Meshed together, and that one actually, I really enjoyed writing that newsletter. I think I had to pause it to recognize that I was heading toward burnout again, um, but I liked that newsletter because there were a couple of different types of pieces that I put together for that. Number one was I search disability. In Google News, and I search climate in Google News, and I look and I pick apart one or two articles that seem timely, and I point to them and then I try to put that in context of disability, climate change, and urban development.

There was one after the Altadena fires. Um, that is probably my favorite piece that I wrote on disability envy, that was just about urban form in California and wildfire evacuations. I like tinkering around in GIS, so put together a map looking at Rates of disability across the state and wildfire footprints, and just showing that the parts of the state with the highest rates of disability, kind of up in the Trinity Northern Sierra area, are also the ones that have had some of the largest wildfires, um, and then looking at Southern California, the Palisades, I almost said paradise, but. Um, well, and actually Paradise, California, I think it was 75% of the fatalities were people were seniors. There were 85 people that perished, 75% were seniors, and then you just say, hey, access some functional needs, you know, as people get older, they're more likely to have disabilities. We know here looking there that. You could easily, and unfortunately there's no data on what percent of wildfire fatalities had disabilities. We don't collect that, you kind of have to use something like age as a proxy, um, but we've seen that and then the piece, you know, anyway, I looked at palisades and rates of age and disability in palisades, and that census tract had one of the highest. Combination rates of people with disabilities and people 65 and over, that Altadena, where the wildfire hit, had a higher than average rate of disability, and that because we are fighting new housing in the wildfire safe areas of the state, Including Berkeley where I used to live, and even here in Oakland, but much of the Bay Area closer to the shoreline, that were pushing people with disabilities into less safe areas for extreme heat, for wildfire, even for flooding.

So, I went and I said, I have this idea, I want to see if what the rates of disability were in SoCal. I think that based on the road map layout, In Palisades, just one of these winding hillside communities that's incredibly difficult to evacuate, um, that there's some story there, and then I'm gonna look at numbers and pull all the GIS stuff together, uh, the shape files, and then from NHGIS.org, which provides census data in the GIS form. Now I'm gonna look at all of that, and it was a great learning experience for me. And then I just got to be able to put that out there and know that I was sharing. That bit of knowledge. So that's a very, very long answer, uh, but it's, uh, um, and I don't even think I got to the point, but just the TLDR of it is writing is, it's not just me blurting out my ideas, it's me learning something, thinking about it, drawing a connection, maybe pulling in some new data, tinkering around with maps, which is always Something I like doing, it's more fun than it is work. Right, exactly. Working on GIS and then sharing it and getting positive feedback, so hey, ego boost, but then also I know I'm making a difference here, so it kind of pulls all of that together.

Yeah, and it's a really wonderful thing, and sometimes it can be maddening and it can be painful and slow, and then it's, you get a finished product and it's, it's one of the best things you've ever, you know, you feel really proud of something like that, and it's hard to quantify, but, um, you know, we are already running out of time, which is really crazy. I guess we've been talking uh as long as we have already, but one of the things we love to do on the show is also talk about what our guests do outside of work. So you have advocacy. And that's great, but uh you also have a hobby related to beavers, and I would like to hear more about this.

Oh man, what is it? Did I, is that, oh God, I, I think I sent you that form a little while ago, um, yeah. Yeah, actually I, I'll say I, I've also taken up 3D printing, which um I really enjoy. That's fun cause it's, yeah, that it's like GIS but then you get to actually, you know, you're tinkering around and the software, but then you get to see this thing that you just printed. Well, first of all, I think beavers are amazing, um, just environmentally, and the fact that, you know, OK, wait, so you're gonna flood this land and you're gonna create your little beaver hut and then swim underneath into it and store your food in there. And that's like, and they don't have, like, no offense to the guys, but they don't have all that much beyond just the, the instinct of I'm gonna chop down trees and gather mud and do this, and, and they're just environmental stewards at the same time. Um, but there's a game called Timberborn, which for anybody that that wants to waste all the time in your life, it's a great. Great game. It's a Minecraft-like map, and you are a colony of beavers, um, and you do a mix of, you know, chop down trees, gather food, and then you can create farms, you can create farms, you can create forestry, you can create dams to manage intermittent droughts, and then Intermittent amounts of time where the water turns toxic, it's called bad water, but then also you can turn that bad water into explosives to do more terraforming. Um, you can, uh, mine ore and then create industry. It's, it's building a lot off of just having a colony of beavers, um, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's great, and I've built huge maps and so it's fun.

That's very fun. I love stuff like that. It's, it's always so great and like. Sometimes you're like, I can't believe I'm playing this, and it's like just the, the joy of it, you know, you're like, yes, but I can also blow out this one thing and then get to that other place, and then that's a lot of fun, and beavers, by the way, are hilarious. They're hilarious animals. They really are. They're like. You know, like, have you ever heard of like a beaver excluder device before where it's like they basically like put a device in that keeps the water low, so the beavers keep basically going, uh, I gotta put more stuff here, and it's just kind of one of those things where it, it basically keeps them from. Like overbuilding an area when it kind of starts flooding people's homes, and it's just this quirky thing that like fits into their mentality and their brain, understanding how they work to kind of manage them for their safety and for people's, and it's just such a funny thing to me. But yeah, beaver deceiver that's what they call it, and it's just like oh there's so many jokes in there, but uh no.

Um, have, have you seen the, um, the largest beaver dam in the world? It's actually visible on Google Earth, and it's up in, uh, the Canadian, it's like the forest where there's kind of peat bogs and it's just very slow moving water going through the soil. So this isn't even capturing a river, it's just capturing all this slow moving water. And it's a very broad beaver dam, and it's something like 3000 ft 2000 ft wide or something like that.

It's giant, yeah, yeah, I'm looking at pictures of it right now cause I can't, why wouldn't I? That's wild. Yeah, see, beavers, well, you know, who knows where? No, but that's great, um, and like I say, I hate, I hate to let you go, but I know we're close to the end of time. Is there anything you wanna talk about that we haven't talked about yet?

I would just encourage your listeners to just start having this conversation. Everybody knows somebody with a disability. Look into it and even beyond this topic, just follow your curiosity, right, that our curiosity is just so powerful, and even if it just leads you to Tidbits about beaver dams in Canada, um, uh, then you can have a fun conversation off of it, but yeah, there's that, actually, uh, this is the same thing where you ask me one question and then I answer again, but, um, all good, all good. Uh, I just have to say, especially now with what's going on with The current administration and austerity in general, we talk about the concerns of climate austerity, and there are just incredible attacks right now happening on social services, on economic capacity, on independent living. There was a Department of Justice memo basically saying that people with disabilities, we, we don't have to. Support their right to live in the community and provide those resources, um, that, you know, going back to an age of institutionalization is OK, despite just decades of court precedent otherwise. Um, I think this is one of the most difficult things about this topic and engaging people with disabilities, it's because we're just fighting for survival all the time. Um, but fighting for that survival, fighting austerity, all of that still at the same time does, you know, improve climate resilience versus the alternative. I don't know, that's just a long philosophical tale to go off of, but something to think about.

No, I think it's a great point. It's a great way to end, and I encourage people to reach out to you, and if they do want to, what is the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, so I, and I'd love to hear from your listeners. My email is Alex@accessibleclimate.com, and then people can find me on LinkedIn, Alex Ghenis, G H E N I S. It's a unique last name and I'm the only one there, so there you go.

Well, thank you so much, Alex, for being here. It's been great.

Yeah, thank you, Nic. I had a great time.

That's our show. Thank you, Alex, for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. Bye. See you, everybody.