From
deforestation to natural resources extraction to the creation of
landfills, ‘Anthropocene,’ a meditative new documentary, brings us
face-to-face with how we’re wrecking our planet.
A scene from Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. [Photo: Edward Burtynsky/courtesy Kino Lorber]
The new documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
doesn’t waste any time getting to the point: For the first minute of
the film, all we see are flames. It’s mesmerizing, in a way, the same
way that a fire burning in a hearth on a cold night inevitably draws our
gaze. But this blaze is underpinned with a sense of horror: In the last
few seconds before the scene cuts, we see that it’s burning
something—it’s hard to tell what, but we know it’s important, and we
know that it’s something to do with our collective future that we’re
ruining.
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[Image: Edward Burtynsky/courtesy Kino Lorber]“Anthropocene,”
after all, is the proposed name for a new geological epoch that
humanity has created by the changes and destruction we’ve wrought on the
planet. “Humans now change the Earth and its systems more than all
natural processes combined,” narrates actor Alicia Vikander at the
documentary’s beginning. The film, which will be released on September
25 and which was directed by photographer Edward Burtynsky—whose work on the same subjectinspired the movie—along with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, traces the scope of human ambition and its consequences across the globe. A scene from Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. [Photo: Edward Burtynsky/courtesy Kino Lorber]That
scope comprises a number of damaging human endeavors: extraction, or
the removal of resources from the earth; anthroturbation, or digging
tunnels under the landscape; technofossils, or the dumping of human-made
products like plastic into the environment; terraforming, or the act of
altering the Earth’s surface for human needs. These categories,
Baichwell tells Fast Company, were laid out by the Working
Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), a cohort of scientists studying this
new epoch. To illustrate them, the filmmakers bring us to Nairobi
National Park in Kenya, where we see workers sorting through 105 tons of
ivory from elephant tusks, and to Norilsk in Siberia, where the world’s
largest heavy-metal smelting complex in the world has resulted in the
most polluted city in Russia. We see mechanical jaws clamping down on
marble deposits in Carrara, Italy, and trees felled on Vancouver Island,
where less than 10% of the old-growth forest remains.
While the
filmmakers followed WGA scientists to these sites, the experts don’t
themselves appear in the film. Baichwell says the filmmakers wanted to
avoid the talking heads common in documentaries in favor of a
“nondidactic, experiential approach where people are transported to
places they would never normally see.” Anthropocene is almost
more of an art film: The camera lingers, and narration is sparse. “We
often get nailed for not being strident enough in our messaging,”
Baichwell says. “But when people can viscerally experience something in
their own mind, it’s more powerful than being told what to do.” Many of these scenes will be familiar to those who have seen Burtynsky’s photography work: His 2018 book, released as part of a larger multimedia initiative called The Anthropocene Project,
featured much of the same imagery. But in the film, we hear directly
from the people at each of these sites. In Norilsk, one woman who works
at the mine describes knowing her home was not a normal city, “but once
you adjust, it pulls you in, and it becomes your own,” she says. “You
become a romantic.” Another chimes in saying that you start to see
beauty in flowers growing out of the concrete.
While Anthropocene
paints a bleak picture, there are moments of optimism and progress:
People are figuring out how to grow crops indoors to save resources, and
harmful practices like poaching elephants for ivory are being outlawed.
While humans have caused the destruction and devastation captured in
the film, we are both responsible for and capable of remedying it. “The
tenacity and ingenuity that helped us thrive can also help us pull these
systems back to a safe place for all life on Earth,” Vikander narrates.
The sleeping habits of CEOs and founders
are revealing in many ways, but the biggest takeaway is this: Most of
them work a lot. That’s little surprise when you consider the fact
that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
even the average full-time worker spends about 8.5 hours at work on a
weekday (and 5.4 hours when they work on the weekend). But there are the
rare exceptions—the CEOs who believe in limiting the time they and
their employees spend working each day.
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Some
CEOs simply work shorter days, while others try to mandate a four-day
workweek. In Sweden, for example, some tech startups have effectively
instituted a six-hour workday, and a company in New Zealand that experimented with a four-day workweek
found it boosted productivity. Stephan Aarstol tried the former at his
company, lifestyle brand Tower. After a year of testing out a five-hour
workday, he opted to make it a company-wide policy. “Being a beach
lifestyle company, where our whole brand is wrapped up in the notion of a
healthy work-life balance, the idea that we should be working
differently, too, if we truly wanted to live differently, wasn’t as much
of a leap,” he wrote on Fast Company.
He’s
not the only leader advocating for a work life that is less of a grind.
We asked three CEOs how they structure their weeks to work less—but
work smarter.
Jason Fried, CEO of project management platform Basecamp
Fried
is an advocate of the 40-hour workweek, working no more than eight
hours a day. But those aren’t always consecutive hours. “I’ll often take
extended breaks through the day and make up time later on,” he says.
In
that time, he usually manages to get just about everything done that
“needs to be done,” he says. But Fried is realistic about the fact that
he’ll probably never get done everything that he wants to do.
“That’s not a function of hours,” he says. “No matter how many hours you
work, there’s always stuff you’ll never be able to get to. Working
eight hours gives me plenty of time to get to all the work that I need
to do, and still plenty that I want to do. That feels like the right
balance.”
Fried also encourages his employees to work no more than
he does. “That’s more than enough time to get great work done,” he
says. “If you don’t think eight hours is enough time, hop a flight from
Chicago to Amsterdam. That’s about eight hours. I promise you it’ll feel
like a long time.”
The 40-hour workweek offers a “useful
constraint,” Fried believes, a constraint that he thinks other CEOs
should adopt as well. “It forces you to focus on what really matters,
trim the stuff that doesn’t, and make every hour count,” he says. “Time
should feel a bit scarce. We value scarce things, we respect scarce
things. And if there’s anything worth respecting, it’s people’s time.”
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Annie Tevelin, CEO of beauty brand SkinOwl
Tevelin aims for a four-day workweek
across her company. “I can’t always attain this, but it’s always my
goal,” she says. It’s hard for her to work less than eight hours a day,
but she encourages her team to work no longer than six hours a day, four
days a week.
“They work Monday-Thursday from 8:30 to 2:30,” she
says. “It’s the most incredible engine I’ve ever seen. They come in and
know how to do their jobs. While we could do more if we worked more
hours, I know that usually there is a lot of dead time in an eight-hour
day.” And who said a typical workday had to be eight hours long? “I’d
rather have people come in, work their hardest, feel present, and enjoy
their lives after work rather than be a slave to the workplace,” she
says. “My team leaves when the sun is still out, which contributes
greatly to their quality of life and their work ethic.”
Since
Tevelin also hosts a podcast, she sometimes struggles to juggle her
workload while recording. “It is harder on the weeks that I’m recording
podcasts due to my commute time, but I never plan my podcast recordings
around big deadlines, as that requires my full attention,” she says.
Tevelin believes she struck the right balance—one that actually
catalyzes her creativity as a founder. “I’ve crafted my business so that
I work less and can enjoy life more, leaving room for more inspiration
to enhance my business,” she says. “Time off is where I came up with the
idea to start a podcast and our dinner collective, the Parliament
Project. Having extra time to think about your business is good for a
CEO in the end. What is the point of running a business if it’s running
you?”
Violette de Ayala, CEO of networking community FemCity
Though
de Ayala works no more than 39 hours, she likes to get a jump start on
the week. “My work [week] actually starts Sunday night, as it’s calm and
I am able to focus on the tasks of the week and kick off the week with
calm clarity,” she says.
Limiting her working hours empowers her
to focus on the most important of tasks. “I feel I get all the top-tier
work done, which are those with the highest priority,” she says. “Those
items that are not deadline-driven or based on dates to respond, I can
push away to the following week. I work with tiers of importance and
time-blocking.”
One of the keys to her productivity is working in
blocks without multitasking, which she encourages her employees to do as
well. She also tries to set an example by not working on Fridays or
weekends. “I don’t generally respond to emails on Friday and the
weekend,” she says, “so it discourages others to send [emails] and work
on the weekends.”
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The
turning point for de Ayala, who used to clock up to 60 hours a week,
was realizing that working longer hours was causing burnout and
impacting the quality of her work. “I was never a believer of working
less than 40 hours until my health started to suffer,” she says. “I
found that I wasn’t getting more done during the plus-40-hour workweek—I
tended to not be as focused and lacked clarity in my work.” Now? She
does less but does it better. “If you are happy, balanced, and take
brackets of time off from work, you produce better quality results,” she
says. “Like all things in life, it’s the quality of the work, not the
quantity. This holds true for the 40-hour or less workweek.”
It’s hard to describe Vantablack, the world’s darkest black pigment, without seeing it for yourself.
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First developed for use in light-sensitive aerospace components (and infamously licensed for artistic use solely by sculptor Anish Kapoor), the pigment uses tiny carbon nanotubes to absorb up to 99.965% of light striking its surface. At Google’s top secret materials lab,
I recently gazed upon a sample of Vantablack in real life for the first
time. It almost broke my brain. It has no reflection, no contours. It’s
like part of the world has been Photoshopped away. Stare at it long
enough, and it feels like your soul is being sucked out of your
eyeballs. [Photo: BMW]I
couldn’t imagine any everyday object being painted in Vantablack, let
alone one that can move at 90 miles per hour. But at the Frankfurt Motor
Show this September, the auto manufacturer will be displaying a one-off
BMW X6 painted in Vantablack.
Even in photos, the effect is
pronounced. The car itself appears two-dimensional. Only details like
the tires, grill, and windows offer visual cues as to the true shape of
the car—though in many images, those components simply seem to be
floating in space.
It’s a frightening idea, to imagine seeing a
Vantablack car on the road. BMW used a more reflective version of the
paint, which bounces back a more generous 1% of visible light, for this
application. Yet even with a slightly reflective surface, a Vatablack
car in your rearview mirror would probably look something like a Looney
Tunes tunnel painted on in the middle of the street. Is that an object
or a void?
Black cars are notably more dangerous to drive than white cars for reasons of visibility already. A study by
Monash University Accident Research Centre in Australia, which studied
crash data across the country from 1987 to 2004, found that compared to
white cars as a baseline, crash risk was higher for just about every
other common color, including red, blue, silver, green, gray, and, yes,
black. Black performed the worst by every measure: In daylight, the
chance of crash is 12% higher than that of white cars. At dawn and dusk,
that jumps to 47%—though your relative risk of getting into an accident
at that time is lower at those hours, the authors point out. Monash’s
study was consistent with at least one other,
from the University of Granada, which determined that yellow was a safe
alternative to white. The center is a respected resource in vehicle
safety, also contributing to the annual Used Car Safety Ratings. In
any case, if black is the least safe color for a car, making that black
even blacker seems like an objectively terrible design decision. In
fact, BMW confirmed outright that this car will not be going into
production. As to whether or not the company considers it safe? “The car
hasn’t been made for road test drives and hasn’t seen daylight yet, but
we will certainly test it on our proving grounds to see how it
reacts/looks outside of a hangar,” a spokesperson said. “Therefore, we
can’t answer this question yet.”
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So
why make this car at all? Is it simply to get the attention of
headlines? Or could it be teasing something else about BMW’s future?
In fact, the latter seems to be the case.
“The
Vantablack X6 is the first project we had using this material, but we
are thinking of other applications than coating a car (which is more a
test or a show car purpose),” they say. “For example, the use of
Vantablack allows to reduce drastically sun reflections on
screens/displays/lenses and could make it’s way in Head-up-Displays or
camera lenses used for driving assistant systems, making them more
accurate by reducing reflections.”
In other words, the future of
Vantablack in cars probably won’t be on the outside of vehicles, but on
their insides, where reflection can actually hinder visual perception.
I, for one, cannot wait to spill fries and latte foam all over my
Vantablack dashboard.
From
Nantucket to Miami Beach—currently under threat from Hurricane
Dorian—medical centers are going to extreme lengths to prepare. “This is
designed to be the last building standing,” says one architect.
Mount Sinai Medical Center [Photo: courtesy Cannon Design]
[Photo: courtesy Cannon Design]The
resilience of hospitals is especially vital for areas that only have
one major medical center. On the islands of Nantucket and Miami Beach,
the latter of which may be affected by the storm this weekend, these
central hospitals don’t just have to keep the lights on during a
storm—they also serve as the center of the entire island’s emergency
management during natural disasters.
“You have to think of these
medical centers as mini-cities that can sustain themselves,” says
Natalie Petzoldt, a principal at CannonDesign who led the design of a new surgery center and emergency department for Mt. Sinai in Miami Beach. “They bring their own staff, and staff stay on site 24 hours a day during these storms.” [Photo: courtesy Cannon Design]Typically,
large medical centers will evacuate everyone who is able to be moved,
while protecting anyone who is too vulnerable to leave and must ride out
the storm with the hospital. Hospitals also will invite some at-risk
people to come stay out the storm, including heavily pregnant mothers or
elderly people in nursing homes who rely on oxygen tanks or other kinds
of assisted living.
Hospitals haven’t always been well-equipped to deal with storms: The horrifying impact of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans’s Memorial Medical Center
is a cautionary tale. With no power or running water, temperatures
inside the hospital reached 100 degrees. The situation was so desperate
that doctors and nurses decided to inject some patients with lethal drug
doses.
More storms, hotter temperatures, and higher floods
The importance of protecting patients during a storm is critical on Nantucket Island, where CannonDesign recently renovated the existing hospital so that it would be able to withstand a Category 4 hurricane.
“When you’re 30 miles out to sea, you only have one option,” says
Dennis Patnaude, the facilities director at Nantucket Cottage Hospital.
“Whatever your health conditions are and whatever Mother Nature throws
at you, you have one place to go.”
To ensure that all these people
will be safe, hospitals have to be designed to ride out whatever a
storm might throw at them—literally. The design of these ultra-durable
buildings is becoming increasingly important as storms get stronger and
more frequent. As climate change accelerates, global temperatures inch
higher and sea levels rise. Critical pieces of infrastructure like
hospitals have to plan for extremes, because what was once considered a
storm that might happen once in 100 years is happening far more
frequently—as often as once every few years.
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[Photo: courtesy Cannon Design]One
concern for the designers of the Mt. Sinai extension in Miami Beach was
ensuring that none of the windows would break due to flying debris.
According
to Michael Zensen, project architect at CannonDesign, the windows of
the Mt. Sinai surgical tower have layers of tempered glass that will
shatter to absorb the impact of a flying object. Then, there’s also a
plane of strong plastic that’s laminated on the inside of the glass to
provide extra support. The walls themselves are built of precast
concrete that’s welded into a steel frame—which Zensen says is one of
the most durable ways to build a wall. It’s a solid eight inches thick.
“There’s no way anything is getting through,” he says. Nantucket Cottage Hospital [Photo: courtesy Cannon Design]On the island of Nantucket, the glass windows have another purpose. They’re made of hurricane-resistant glass from the glass company Andersen,
and they’re also designed in a residential style to allow people to
open them—unusual in a medical setting. While the choice to use operable
windows had aesthetic benefits, helping the hospital blend in with the
island’s historic character, it had a practical logic as well: “You put
in operable windows so if there was a need for summer, you’d be able to
open the windows and provide cooling and ventilation” if the power does
go out, says Brett Farbstein, the resiliency lead at CannonDesign who
worked on the project. [Photo: courtesy Cannon Design]
Designing a self-sustaining small city
But
more than wind, the biggest threat to hospitals comes from water. The
island of Miami Beach is partially composed of in-filled land, and the
hospital sits along a seawall built over the decades by the Army Corps
of Engineers on the bay side of the island. Miami Beach and the rest of
southern Florida is already suffering from flooding due to rising tides, even when there’s no major storm. A 2016 study in Nature
showed that Florida residents are most at risk from climate change
compared to any other U.S. state, mostly due to sea level rise and
flooding. To curb its woes, the city of Miami Beach is spending $400 million on high-tech pumps and an initiative to raise streets to a higher elevation.
Due
to fears over flooding, CannonDesign decided to exceed the local
building code requirement of buildings being seven feet above sea level
by a full three feet. “I don’t think anyone can predict the future,”
says Jim Gordon, the CannonDesign project manager for the Mt. Sinai
project. “It seems like a responsible way to do better than what’s
required.” [Photo: courtesy Cannon Design]The
most important thing when it comes to potential flooding is making sure
that water won’t take out a building’s power supply—something that devastated multiple hospitals
during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy in New York City. Both Mt. Sinai Miami
Beach and Nantucket Cottage Hospital have been designed so that all this
vital equipment is either on the second floor of the hospital or
higher.
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In
Miami Beach, the mechanical gear is on the third level—at great
expense, the hospital’s president and CEO Steve Sonenreich says (likely
due to special infrastructure needed to support it). The hospital’s new
emergency department and surgery center also have all their operating
rooms on the second floor or higher. “Along with a power plant that is
designed to withstand 180-plus-mile-per-hour sustained winds, when the
generators are elevated 40 feet above the flood plane and we can power
up and run our operations for nine days, we’ve created facilities that
are as hurricane-proof as I think is possible,” Sonenreich says.
In
Nantucket, the generators and HVAC system are on the roof, and the
hospital was designed so that all the mechanical systems have some level
of redundancy. Because the island is so far from the mainland, the team
also invested in enough fuel for the generator so that it can last for
96 hours—a full day longer than the 72 hours required by code. [Photo: courtesy Cannon Design]
The “worst case scenario” is getting worse
Along
with redesigning their buildings to keep key mechanical equipment away
from water and ensuring there are backups if something fails, both
Nantucket Cottage and Mt. Sinai Miami Beach have built dedicated spaces
for their city emergency departments to camp out. At Mt. Sinai, this
“situation room,” as Sonenreich called it, is completely controlled by
the city and can serve as a staging area for any kind of disaster or
emergency. “We worked very closely with police and fire for the city of
Miami Beach and we had the thought, since they do embed with us during a
storm, of providing for them an emergency command center,” Sonenreich
says, “We like having them here.”
In Nantucket, it’s a similar
situation. “This is designed to be the last building standing,”
says Patnaude. “This design and the thought behind this one would be
that in the worst-case scenario, this is where the island’s command
center would be.” [Photo: courtesy Cannon Design]The
Cottage Hospital’s layout also lends itself to act as a community hub
in a disaster. A large lobby space on the first floor opens directly
into the cafeteria. “If something were to happen, you’d have a large
gathering space proximal to food . . . that isn’t affecting the patient
care of the hospital,” says Brian McKenna, who leads Cannon’s health
practice in the company’s Boston office.Hospitals have always
been designed for the worst-case scenario—but what’s considered the
worst case is changing. For Farbstein, the resiliency expert, hospital
admins have to think about investing in even more extreme measures to
protect themselves against an uncertain future. Take HVAC equipment.
Hospitals might be used to assuming that there would be five or six days
a year above 90 degrees. But 20 years from now, that might be 17 or 18
days a year.
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“Because
we’re beyond historic data, we’re into predictive forecasting,” he
says. “How can you make sure your building is adaptable to what’s going
to happen in the future?”
Bringing
your own lunch to work doesn’t just keep you from hemorrhaging money on
Uber Eats and filling your body with the empty calories of day-old
bagels and cookies. It’s also a chance to avoid buying all those
saran-wrapped sandwiches, salads encased in plastic domes, and plastic
soup containers that may or may not be recyclable—and that often end up
in landfill. The key is to limit your own waste as you pack up your food
for the day.
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The same goes for packing your kids’ school lunches. A case study
from Ohio shows how much of a difference waste-free lunches can make.
During a one-day “Zero-Waste Challenge,” all 287 students at Hilton
Elementary School in Brecksville, Ohio, attempted to eat zero-waste
lunches. The results: The entire student body created only 12 pounds of
trash, compared with the school’s usual average of 160 pounds of lunch
waste.
Here are a few tips and tools that make packing a
waste-free lunch for you and your family as convenient as downing a
sleeve of pre-packaged Oreos. [Photo: courtesy of Parkland]BOX IT UP
The first step to packing a waste-free lunch is finding a lunchbox that
stores food safely and efficiently, and is actually fun to carry around.
As we’ve reported before, recycled plastic lunch boxes from Parkland ($19.99)
are more environmentally friendly than traditional
polyester-and-plastic ones, but still come in fun patterns and designs
(think polka dots and dinosaurs).And for brown paper bag fans, Ecobags makes an Organic Cotton lunch bag ($8)
that comes with a side-rope handle for carrying and a Velcro closure to
keep your food from spilling out. Made offers a similar sack-style lunch tote ($22), made of a washable waxed canvas that’s waterproof—good for wet commutes (or spills). [Photos: courtesy of LARQ; courtesy of FinalStraw]GUZZLE DOWN
Stay hydrated with a self-cleaning LARQ bottle ($95),
which uses a UV-LED light to eliminate up to nearly all
bio-contaminants from your water and the bottle you never think to
clean. But you can keep classic Hydroflask ($30) or S’well ($35) bottles clean with a little help from nontoxic, all-natural, and biodegradable Bottle Bright tabs (starting at $8). Oh, and bonus points if you bring a reusable straw with you. This foldable metal one ($25) is ethically made and easy to leave in a backpack or bag to use whenever the sip-able occasion strikes.For kids who like to give their water bottles a little squeeze, try the CamelBak Podium Chill($14) series of insulated water bottles. The soft-sided bottles are BPA-free, leak-proof, easy to clean, and come in multiple colors.
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[Photo: courtesy of Knork]CUT TO IT
Plastic forks (even the reusable kind) and disappointing sporks from
campsites past have no place in a respectably packed lunch. Instead, opt
for sustainable cutlery from Knork ($7).
Knork’s colorful spoons and forks are made from sugar cane starch and
bamboo, can be machine washed, and compost within two years of disposal.
But nothing beats real metal cutlery. The spoon, fork, and knife in
the Snow Peak Titanium cutlery set ($35) are ultra-light and fit into a slim canvas carrying case that’s easy to slip into a lunchbox. Or you can pick up a stainless steel, 20-piece set($20) from Target’s year-old Made by Design line and have enough forks and knives for a family’s-worth of packed lunches.[Photo: courtesy of Bee’s Wrap]THAT’S A WRAP
Say it with us: No more Saran Wrap. Or tin foil. Or paper towels. These
days it’s easy to make waste-free swaps with things like the Bee’s Wrap Lunch Pack ($21)—a
three-piece collection of reusable sandwich-and snack-sized storage
wraps that are made from waxed organic cotton. Stasher’s resealable silicon plastic bags(from $11.99) don’t
come cheap, but they’re worth the investment. And considering that the
average person uses 2,200 paper napkins a year, cutting back on trash is
easy by switching to organic cotton cloth napkins ($2). They can also be used to clean up messes, wrap up leftovers, and dry hands after washing.[Photos: courtesy of LunchBots; courtesy of Le Parfait]CARRY ON
LunchBots lunch containers are the classic option for creating perfectly portioned on-the-go meals, Bento box-style.
The brand is known for making meal containers that are leak-proof and
machine washable, and allow you to create substantial meals, thanks to
the compartmentalized design. But if you want to keep your mac n’ cheese
and matzo ball soup hot until the lunch bell rings, try the 16-ounce wide mouth thermos ($35)
from LunchBots: Its shape (wide-mouthed and bowl-like) makes
thermos-dining less awkward. For those who prefer shake salads (you know
who you are), the extra-large, one liter Le Parfait “Super” jars ($23)
are a great take-anywhere option. The lid is attached by a metal hinge,
so you’ll never lose it—and unlike Mason jars, Le Parfait jars have no
BPA linings.Fast Company may receive revenue for some links to products on our site.
As
more tech companies begin to pay lip service to the idea of hiring
people with criminal records, one former inmate’s journey to a tech
career shows how possible it is.
At
the end of 2017, Emile DeWeaver was 20 years into a life sentence in
San Quentin for murdering a man when he was 19. Right now, he’s sitting
at a desk in San Francisco in the offices of Pilot, a startup that manages bookkeeping for businesses, working as a product specialist and communicating with clients.
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How
DeWeaver moved from San Quentin to the midst of the Bay Area tech scene
is, almost needless to say, quite the story. But it’s one that, as both
the criminal justice system in the U.S. and the tech industry continue
to evolve, could become much more common.
When DeWeaver entered
San Quentin in 1998, he started to work on himself. Through
conversations with older men incarcerated at the facility, he began to
consider how growing up amid violence and poverty in Oakland set him on
the path to incarceration himself. “I was thinking about this not to
make excuses, but because in understanding the process, you get to
understand solutions,” DeWeaver says. For him, the path to crime “came
down to a deep sense of isolation and alienation from society.”
So
while in prison—which is a system, he says, designed to perpetuate that
same isolation and alienation he experienced as a young person—he began
to figure out how to transcend it using a talent he knew he possessed:
writing. With two other incarcerated men at San Quentin, DeWeaver
founded Prison Renaissance,
a nonprofit that highlights works of art and writing made by people
inside prisons. “Trying to start a nonprofit from prison is difficult,”
DeWeaver says. Incarcerated people don’t have any direct internet
access, so DeWeaver and his cofounders “basically ended up patching it
together through a lot of social hacks, or analog hacks,” he says. San
Quentin hosts a number of programs that bring in outside volunteers to
work with inmates, and DeWeaver and his cofounders made connections with
people in the arts, and with other artists in the prison, to spread the
word about their initiative. Prison Renaissance is now forging
partnerships with universities in California—currently UCLA and
Stanford—to bring students into artistic collaboration with incarcerated
writers and artists. Jessica McKellar and Emile DeWeaver [Photo: courtesy of Pilot]At
the same time, DeWeaver was working on launching the first in-prison
chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists to bring more voices
of incarcerated people into the public discourse (DeWeaver himself has
contributed op-eds to a number of different publications). Through that
work, he met Pilot founder and CTO Jessica McKellar, who was there
through her work with Life of the Law, a podcast about the legal system.
(McKellar serves as member of the advisory board for Life of the Law,
which she got involved with through her interest in expanding justice
and diversity through tech.)In collaborating on a storytelling
project about life inside San Quentin, “she got a chance to see my
workset, which is one that I’ve transferred from career to career—from
starting a nonprofit to doing social justice advocacy work,” DeWeaver
says. “A lot of the creative and outside-the-box thinking is
transferrable to management and product and learning things quickly,”
DeWeaver says. McKellar saw almost immediately that DeWeaver could bring
some valuable skills to Pilot. “He’s a very incisive mind on various
social issues, he’s an incredible writer, and has leadership experience
organizing people around causes,” McKellar says.
At the time they
met in 2017, DeWeaver was incarcerated. When then Governor Jerry Brown
commuted his sentence for his progress and leadership within the prison
at the end of that year and he became eligible for parole, McKellar told
DeWeaver that she wanted to offer him the opportunity to interview for a
role at Pilot. “We were hiring for people who were smart and great
problem solvers and communicators,” she says. “I had someone right in
front of me with those skills, so why not create an opportunity to hire
him for the team?” Because DeWeaver was still at San Quentin during the
interview process as he awaited a parole hearing, the Pilot team had to
be creative. “There was quite a rigmarole getting a whole interview
panel gate-cleared to get into the prison,” McKellar says, and to
circumvent the lack of internet, they conducted certain portions of the
process that would’ve been done on the computer on paper instead. And
because he’d never interviewed for a job before, McKellar walked him
through the basic format ahead of time.
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Emile DeWeaver and Governer Jerry Brown. [Photo: courtesy of Pilot]As
the head of a tech company, hiring DeWeaver was first and foremost a
matter of what he brought to the team—as he approaches the end of his
first year at Pilot, McKellar says that he’s been instrumental in
assisting with product development and client communications.
But
it also illustrates the potential for the technology industry to create
opportunities for people leaving prison. Many tech companies are
beginning to make efforts
to hire people with criminal records, but that work to diversify
hiring, McKellar says, can begin while people are still inside. Having
employment lined up, McKellar says, is highly advantageous as people
reintegrate into society. But too often, DeWeaver adds, the idea that
reentry begins the moment people leave prison holds sway. “Reentry
should begin the moment a person walks into prison,” he says. His
connections with McKellar and other advocates from outside the prison
arose through his dedication to forging opportunities for himself. But
in-prison programming that connects more people who could soon be
leaving incarceration to resources and opportunities while they’re still
inside could ease the transition for many more.
And tech
companies, McKellar adds, could play an instrumental role. “Our industry
has so many resources, and there are so many talented people in prison
and coming out of prison,” she says. Pilot has now hired several people,
including DeWeaver, who were formerly incarcerated, and ensures that
they receive enough training to feel comfortable on the job as they
begin. DeWeaver quickly ramped up to working full-time. It’s been
important, McKellar says, for the Pilot team to learn about what it
means for him to be on parole and grant him the time needed to attend
classes and meet with his parole officer as needed. DeWeaver also says
that the culture at Pilot has encouraged him to continue his work with
Prison Renaissance now that he’s on the outside.
As DeWeaver
continues to pursue justice advocacy alongside his career in tech, he’s
noticed that “one of the biggest misconceptions I run into in social
justice work is this idea that there’s nothing you can do,” he says.
For
tech companies like Pilot, “hiring formerly incarcerated people is one
thing you can do,” he says. And making that decision involves a
broadening of the definition of diversity in a way that both DeWeaver
and McKellar feel can benefit tech and other industries.
“I feel
like there’s two kinds of diversity,” DeWeaver says. “There’s inclusion,
which says you can be included if you act and look like me. And maybe
you don’t look like me, but if you act enough like me, we’ll pretend
that you look like me. But that’s not really diversity.”
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At Pilot, he says, “the diversity I enjoy is this idea of inclusion and you
get to be who you are. I’m formerly incarcerated and I’ve come in and
my strengths have been brought to bear on product development and
building a stronger company. When people see that an office environment
can hold even a person in my position, they know that it can hold them.
They know they’re working in a place that has their back.”
There are many reasons why you procrastinate.
You might find it difficult to face your fears of not doing a specific
task well enough. You might be put off by the unpleasant feelings you
associate with tackling a specific project. Or you might convince
yourself that because you work better under pressure, you might as well wait until the deadline is closer.
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But
while everyone procrastinates at some level, chronic procrastination
can have serious consequences. Not being able to tick something off your
to-do list doesn’t always mean it’s the end of the world, but if you
consistently fail to meet deadlines, or ask your boss for an extension
every single week, they’ll probably hear alarm bells and may even start thinking about disciplinary measures.
There
are many ways to beat procrastination, but the easiest way to get
things done is to make a to-do list that works with your natural
tendencies. Don’t know where to start? Here are some ideas to consider.
1. Figure out what to eliminate or automate
If
you’re the kind of procrastinator who can’t seem to complete your to-do
list because there are simply too many items, you might want to figure
out what you can eliminate. For those time-consuming tasks that are
necessary (but don’t bring you a lot of returns), you might want to see
if there are solutions and systems in place that will do it for you.
For
starters, if you’ve been doing your budget manually, now might be the
time to look at using software. You can also design systems for that
particular activity to make it easier for yourself. As Zapier’s Justin Pot previously wrote,
“There’s something strangely satisfying about setting up an automation
to do tasks you’d otherwise be doing manually, which is why it’s become
one of my go-to procrastination activities.”
2. Make sure that your tasks are broken down into specific parts
Sometimes it seems daunting to start a project because of its scale, which is why it’s important to break tasks down into small chunks.
Sometimes, even that’s overwhelming. As a writer, this is a common
dilemma I face when I’m writing an article. I know that once I write the
introduction, the rest of the piece typically writes itself. But there
are days when writing that introduction seems impossible.
There
are instances when the answer is to take a break and come back to it.
But when you have deadlines to meet and that’s not an option, you can
try moving to another part of those tasks. Going back to the writing
example, there is no rule that says you can’t write your ending before
the beginning, or start in the middle, before adding an introduction and
a conclusion. When you find yourself getting bored with one part of the
task, give yourself an excuse to move on to another part.
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3. Start a project-specific, rather than day-specific, to-do list
Using
a daily to-do list can be demoralizing. This is because what tends to
happen is that you write a long to-do list, and when you inevitably
don’t complete all of them, you carry it over to the next day, and your
list gets longer and longer. This is demoralizing, writes Alice Boyes,
psychologist and author of “7 Strategies for Conquering Procrastination and Avoidance.”
Boyes
suggested that rather than having a daily to-do list, you can have
project-specific to-do lists. “By writing all the actions you need to
take for a particular project on a list just for that project, you can
work through your tasks as you have time. Project-specific to-do lists
also help you use scraps of time effectively. For example, if you have a
spare five to 10 minutes, and there is a five-to-10-minute job on your
list, you can quickly see that option.”
4. Commit to doing one item, and then clear out the rest of your day
Sometimes,
the best way of tackling procrastination is to focus on one thing, and
then give yourself the permission to do whatever you want for the rest
of the day. Boyes advised that you should think about an important task
you’ve been putting off for a long time, and only put that one thing in
your calendar. Once you’ve completed that task, it’s up to you how you
want to spend your time.
What you might find, Boyes said, is that
you attend to the other tasks that aren’t on your list. However, you
will probably enjoy them more because you won’t see it as an obligation,
but an added bonus. You can also do them at a leisurely pace, easing
the pressure of finishing something by a certain time.
5. Create a procrastination “low-energy” list
When
all else fails, the best thing you can do is to ensure that your
“procrastination’ activity is one that moves you forward. However,
chances are, you won’t have the energy to tackle tasks that require a
great deal of emotional bandwidth, so you need to have a
“procrastination” list that contains a lot of tasks that are different
enough from the items on your actual to-do lists, and are relatively
quick and painless to do. Pot writes, “The idea is to find things that
need to get done but aren’t overwhelming or exhausting to the extent
that larger projects are. Try to think up similar tasks, then dive into
them next time you don’t feel like getting started on a big project.”
From
deforestation to natural resources extraction to the creation of
landfills, ‘Anthropocene,’ a meditative new documentary, brings us
face-to-face with how we’re wrecking our planet.
A scene from Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. [Photo: Edward Burtynsky/courtesy Kino Lorber]
The new documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
doesn’t waste any time getting to the point: For the first minute of
the film, all we see are flames. It’s mesmerizing, in a way, the same
way that a fire burning in a hearth on a cold night inevitably draws our
gaze. But this blaze is underpinned with a sense of horror: In the last
few seconds before the scene cuts, we see that it’s burning
something—it’s hard to tell what, but we know it’s important, and we
know that it’s something to do with our collective future that we’re
ruining.
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[Image: Edward Burtynsky/courtesy Kino Lorber]“Anthropocene,”
after all, is the proposed name for a new geological epoch that
humanity has created by the changes and destruction we’ve wrought on the
planet. “Humans now change the Earth and its systems more than all
natural processes combined,” narrates actor Alicia Vikander at the
documentary’s beginning. The film, which will be released on September
25 and which was directed by photographer Edward Burtynsky—whose work on the same subjectinspired the movie—along with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, traces the scope of human ambition and its consequences across the globe. A scene from Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. [Photo: Edward Burtynsky/courtesy Kino Lorber]That
scope comprises a number of damaging human endeavors: extraction, or
the removal of resources from the earth; anthroturbation, or digging
tunnels under the landscape; technofossils, or the dumping of human-made
products like plastic into the environment; terraforming, or the act of
altering the Earth’s surface for human needs. These categories,
Baichwell tells Fast Company, were laid out by the Working
Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), a cohort of scientists studying this
new epoch. To illustrate them, the filmmakers bring us to Nairobi
National Park in Kenya, where we see workers sorting through 105 tons of
ivory from elephant tusks, and to Norilsk in Siberia, where the world’s
largest heavy-metal smelting complex in the world has resulted in the
most polluted city in Russia. We see mechanical jaws clamping down on
marble deposits in Carrara, Italy, and trees felled on Vancouver Island,
where less than 10% of the old-growth forest remains.
While the
filmmakers followed WGA scientists to these sites, the experts don’t
themselves appear in the film. Baichwell says the filmmakers wanted to
avoid the talking heads common in documentaries in favor of a
“nondidactic, experiential approach where people are transported to
places they would never normally see.” Anthropocene is almost
more of an art film: The camera lingers, and narration is sparse. “We
often get nailed for not being strident enough in our messaging,”
Baichwell says. “But when people can viscerally experience something in
their own mind, it’s more powerful than being told what to do.” Many of these scenes will be familiar to those who have seen Burtynsky’s photography work: His 2018 book, released as part of a larger multimedia initiative called The Anthropocene Project,
featured much of the same imagery. But in the film, we hear directly
from the people at each of these sites. In Norilsk, one woman who works
at the mine describes knowing her home was not a normal city, “but once
you adjust, it pulls you in, and it becomes your own,” she says. “You
become a romantic.” Another chimes in saying that you start to see
beauty in flowers growing out of the concrete.
While Anthropocene
paints a bleak picture, there are moments of optimism and progress:
People are figuring out how to grow crops indoors to save resources, and
harmful practices like poaching elephants for ivory are being outlawed.
While humans have caused the destruction and devastation captured in
the film, we are both responsible for and capable of remedying it. “The
tenacity and ingenuity that helped us thrive can also help us pull these
systems back to a safe place for all life on Earth,” Vikander narrates.
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