Transcript: Dr. CHANDA PRESCOD-WEINSTEIN on the Night Sky and Liberation Discourse /228
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein The night sky can be part of our liberation discourse and not just part of our fears about what technology is doing to us.
Ayana Young Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire, USA. Her work on particle physics and cosmology focuses especially on the dark matter problem, and she is a topical convenor for the 2021 Snowmass Particle Physics Community Planning Process.
In addition, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinsteinis a Black feminist theorist of science, technology, and society studies, and she is an executive committee member of the American Physical Society (APS) Forum on the History of Physics. She is the recipient of the APS 2021 Edward A. Bouchet Award for contributions to particle cosmology research and co-founding Particles for Justice. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred will be published in the US and Canada on March 9, 2021.
Thank you so much for joining us today to speak to a topic that we have yet to cover on For The Wild. So I am really excited.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Thank you for having me on. I'm excited.
Ayana Young As big a question as this is, I'd like to begin by situating listeners in the disorder of the universe. So to start us off, I wonder if you can share how physics or cosmology can help give us some perspective, as we think about our relationship with the timescale of the universe.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein I think one of the kind of intersections of cosmology and philosophy maybe is to think about not just what was our history, so you're kind of starting with the inflationary era, which is 10 to the minus 43 seconds after whatever started our bubble of space-time. Sometimes we call this the Big Bang, but we're not really sure what happened. So that's a period when space-time expanded really rapidly, spacetime grew very quickly. And it happened in less than a second, so that’s a very short timeframe, a very dramatic change to the universe. And then in the time since then, space-time has just been expanding. So that's all of our past, that's our history.
One of the questions that we can ask is also what will be the future of space-time? So that's not something that I have personally done a lot of research on, I definitely point people to Katie Mack’s The End of Everything if they're interested in these kinds of questions. But it is really a very different timescale that, as I mentioned, the inflationary era happened during a very short fraction of a second, and then since then, there have been something like around 14 billion years. And in the future, the universe will look different from the way that it looks now. And so there really are just these very different timescales involved in the different types of scientific questions that we can ask depending on what period of time we're interested in, you have to concern yourself with very short timescales or extremely long ones.
Ayana Young And when you say the universe would look very different, or will look very different, what does that mean? If you could describe that a bit for us?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Yeah, so one hypothesis is that eventually, the stars that exist now will burn out, they'll burn all of their hydrogen, and some of them will supernova, some of them will turn into what we erroneously call planetary nebulae. And this is like a historical term, because people used to think that they were planets, but they're actually just like remnants of stars. So they're kind of like the grave of a star or something like that. And so the thought is that, because of the expansion of space, time, fewer next-generation stars will be born, because so much stuff is going to be pulled apart. And so one potential long-term future for the universe is that the universe does get darker, that there's less light traveling through it, there's less light being produced. So that's certainly one outcome. Again, it's not something that I think about a lot, because I think there are so many questions with the history that I can't even worry about the future yet.
Ayana Young And I guess to ground this thought, for those of us who don't think about this often. How do I ask this? It's not, why does it matter to us humans to know the history, but what can it teach us, especially for those of us who aren't experts in this, or are trying to be?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein I think it's just a matter of knowing that the universe is so much bigger than we can even fully comprehend than we thought, like, I'm continuously like, “Wow, it's really complicated.” And, you know, I'm like an expert on a lot of this stuff. And I'm still impressed by how complicated it is. So I think it's just like a reminder that we, I think, I'm paraphrasing Carl Sagan, probably quite poorly, from maybe from the adaptation of his film Contact, of his book Contact into a film, where I think towards the end, Jodie Foster's character says something like “We are so precious, we are so insignificant, yet precious”, because we are really small, like an individual human is not alive for very long compared to the timeline of the universe. But when we are born, when we exist, we are the one instance of that existence that ever happens.Ayana Young Wow. That is so deep, and also really brings up for me the ephemeral nature of this life as well and of the planet, and how it's manifesting itself at the moment and how quickly that can change. And we don't know when things will change. And, I think a lot of that unknowing is just not really even being able to comprehend timescales. So yeah, anyways, my mind is really trying to take this in, and see the vastness of it, and really be able to place ourselves within that as best as we can.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Yeah, I think that that's, you know, you're not alone. I don't think my brain is any better at really, in some spiritual sense, comprehending 14 billion years. I'm just used to it. And I know how to work with it, and I have certain associations with it. But that doesn't mean that I can really like picture or have a feeling for what 14 billion years feels like. So we're all struggling with that.
Ayana Young Yeah. And I think I also struggle with the concept that because things were created so quickly, they can also change that quickly. But it's also in this very long timescale. And so it's, yeah, it's holding both the quickness and the slowness, and how to even relate to those two things when thinking about the history of the universe. It's like, whoa, that's really, what mental gymnastics that you go through on the daily.Dr.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Yeah, I think, you know, it's funny because I don't think about it in those terms, because it's a matter of practice. I'm very practiced at thinking in these terms and so it’s like learning a language. This is actually something I said to a student this morning, to an undergraduate, which is like nobody's born thinking like this. You learn the language and you speak it. And that is what makes it intuitive for you. It's a matter of practice.
Ayana Young What initially drew me to your work was your focus on early universe cosmology. Can you share a bit about your focus here, what we know about the potential “beginning” of the universe, and how theoretical cosmology is really a form of storytelling?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Yeah, I like to think of what I do as storytelling using math. So I think there are a lot of different ways to tell stories about the universe, and they do different things for us. So I subscribe to the Sylvia Winter school of thought, that we are biocultural species, where storytelling is embedded in who we are as a species. And so the different types of storytelling that we do, I think, do different things. And, you know, I am not in the school of scientists who thinks that one particular form of storytelling is superior to the others. As a Jew, I think that the storytelling we do in my synagogue is actually really important for helping me think about my values. And I actually think that, you know, the mathematical stories we tell don't necessarily help us think about our values. And actually, sometimes, when we try and do that mathematical storytelling, without thinking about values, it gets us into trouble. So I think one of the things that's really like tantalizing about doing theoretical cosmology is that we can use all of this physics that we basically developed just from looking at the night sky, and just from doing experiments here on Earth, and we can actually put together a coherent story that is self-consistent with all of the observations that we seem that gives us the story from again, 10 to the minus 43 seconds. So you know, a decimal point with over 40 zeros after it, that we can tell a story from that point in time to the point where we are now, and there are certainly holes in it, but actually, we have a pretty good coherent story that has, relatively speaking, very few holes in it.
Ayana Young Before we delve into The Disordered Cosmos and the fusion of work you unfurl; I’d like to sort of introduce listeners to this fusion through your thought around dark matter. I understand that things like galaxies, stars, planets, humans, and trees make up about 5% of the matter in our universe, whereas 85% of matter in the universe is considered intangible “dark” matter. Can you share what the fascination is with dark matter for listeners who are newer to astrophysics before we get into the terminology?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Why is dark matter fascinating to us? I think probably I answer this question very differently from someone who doesn't actually do research in the field, right. But for me, it's such an incredible thing that actually the universe is mostly stuff that we can't see. So we're used to thinking of the universe in terms of what we can see, and really, this whole paradigm that most of the matter in the universe is transparent to light, that light seems to go right through it so we call it dark matter, for reasons that you say we'll discuss in a moment, but it's incredible that actually the universe is mostly what we can't see, not mostly what we can see. It's a complete reversal, I think of our entire intuition about what's going on when we look at the sky.
Ayana Young Yeah, that brings up so much about what we can and can't see and the power or belief that we put into what you know, both of those, or that binary and in The Disordered Cosmos, you examine the naming of dark matter and how it is often incorrectly framed as something foreboding and unknown, when in fact this matter is vital to all that exists. Can you share why the term “dark matter” is a misnomer, and how this example can serve as a primer to some of the larger work you are interrogating when it comes to the colonial legacy of really all academic fields?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein So as I just mentioned, light through it, so it's not dark, it doesn't absorb light the way that objects that have a dark color tend to and it's simply the absence of anything impeding light in some sense. So if I were to have like a bunch of dark matter in my hands, if it was possible to put dark matter in my hands, I would feel weighed down, like it would feel like I was holding something that had some weight associated with it, because it has mass, but I would still be able to see my hands, because light would go through the dark matter, it would bounce off my hands into my eyes just the way that it would if the dark matter wasn't there, maybe the dark matter would disturb the light a little bit. But what we know so far about dark matter is that for the most part, it doesn't have interactions with light. If it does have interactions with light, they're very minimal. So when we're thinking about why is dark matter, called dark matter, I want people to really unpack what is the history of the context in which this term arose? And what were the associations that people in that time period had with dark in particular, in Europe? How is the word dark being used and circulated socially? And sort of a larger point here is that all of these questions that how we named things are always social questions. They're not being handed down to us on a mount on a tablet from, you know, some higher being or something like that. These are decisions being made by people, and their cultural context informs what seems normal to them.
Ayana Young That is such a good point. Really important for us to interrogate where language comes from, and how that shapes the way we understand things. Yeah, I studied theology in undergrad, and just learning about the context behind so much of the Bible, for instance, was really eye-opening. And so I can see how the time in which this was created, influenced how it's been replicated in academia over time. And, yeah, in the past couple of years, there has been a huge effort by both private companies and the government to begin developing plans and technology to colonize space as a new frontier, instead of extending dominion across oceans, many are now looking to reach above…And, in terms of colonial processes, I think back to previous conversations I’ve had, where Indigenous folks are acutely aware of what the future implications are of colonial processes; how the water is poisoned, the land degraded, etc. but it doesn’t matter at all to those who are doing the colonizing, even though they too will be impacted. You also write about this potential reality in terms of space colonization, and so I wonder if I could ask you how you are thinking about future preclusions in terms of the universe?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein You know, I'm always a little bit worried about us humans deciding to go off and do something that we still don't do well, but doing it in a new location. And you know, it's a little bit like putting someone on the freeway when they're still not comfortable driving on the street. And I definitely think that we as a species, still haven't really figured out how to be cool, and literally cool with planet Earth, and so I have genuine concerns about the push to go beyond Earth and start thinking about settlements. And I keep saying we here, but of course, like, it's actually like a very small subset of the population that is thinking about using resources to go beyond Earth. While a larger percentage of the population, I think, is trying to survive the consequences of those kinds of behaviors here on Earth, and are even, you know, trying to save Earth from those consequences. So of course, like the rock that is Earth will survive, but the question is whether it will still be habitable for our species in a way that has been for the last several 1000 years. I think that we really have to worry about that now. Right? We're facing global warming. So what does it mean in the middle of a crisis? And I purposefully say man-made crisis, like global warming, to say, yeah, now seems like a really good time to planet hop and see what happens if we try and, you know, shape an environment on a different planet. Like we can't even live in harmony with an environment that's already ideal for our existence. How much worse does that get when we start doing things like planet scaping?
Ayana Young That's such a good point. And in your book, you know, there's this part about really asking who profits, who will perish, from these expeditions? And will these missions exacerbate inequalities on Earth? And, yeah, I think, to push forward with space exploration with no critical analysis of how we have treated the Earth is crazy. I mean, it's so short-sighted and it's really, what's the word I'm looking for? Just the hubris, the ego behind that, I think there's something there.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Yeah. I think the hubris is exactly right. We often hear technology discussed in terms as a kind of savior. Like, technology always makes life better. Technology always makes the world better. But technology is also the reason that we're in the situation with global warming. So obviously, as a physicist, I'm not a Luddite. I'm a total gadget geek. Personally, I really like gadgets, I'm really into that kind of stuff. But I do think that there has to be careful thought put into, you know, again, what are our values around what we do with our scientific knowledge? What are our values around the kinds of technologies we develop and deploy? And are they sustainable? Like, we just need to start asking different questions about our own technologies, we need to make different demands of our technologies. And I think that we're not there yet.
So certainly, you know, when we talk about hubris, I'm just thinking about the fact that global warming is a technological advancement. Is it a good thing for humanity? No. So when we valorize technological advancement, as always being a positive, I think there's a kind of hubris in disrespecting the Earth. And in thinking against all evidence that we can always have total control of the situations that we get ourselves into. And so I think that we need to do much better. And again, I'm saying we, but there's still really just a small subset of the population that has the power to make all of these decisions pretty much on behalf of everyone else. And so part of what needs to change is how power to make these kinds of decisions for humanity is distributed. Like right now, we have a few people in government really, not just in the United States, but also, for example, China's been in the news recently, because of their moon mission, that there needs to be some really careful thought about even for example, what it means, people are talking about mining and the moon, what does it mean to mine the moon and potentially change what we see, when we look at the moon? What does that mean, for us as a species that has evolved with a particular relationship to a night sky, that looks a particular way to suddenly and pretty drastically over a short timescale relative to our time, our evolutionary time, drastically change that. And so I think there's a kind of hubris and thinking that like, we knew what impact that will have on us as a species, and then the hubris of the very few people who are in a position to decide whether to do these kinds of projects or not thinking that it's okay to make those decisions on the on behalf of the rest of humanity.
Ayana Young Yes, I'm with you. And there are so many potential impacts, you know, also spiritual impacts, let alone physical impacts to the Earth like, thinking about mining the moon. Gosh, I just am like, wow, is this where some of us are going in our minds, like this mental poison that I think has infected so many of us at this point? This, I think about the word wetiko, an Algonquin term that Eriel Deranger brought up in one or two of the interview I’ve done with her, just what it takes for somebody to have the hubris and not care about the implications of making huge decisions on behalf of everyone like you were saying, it's really like a psychological, gosh, yeah, I could really get lost in that wormhole.
But just to continue with this topic, I’m thinking about how visually our night sky is changing with the addition of more and more satellites, and I know this topic is a bit on the periphery of what you study, so I hope you don’t mind me bringing it up, but the absurdity of it just feels worth underscoring as we talk about space colonization, which is that now our satellites are causing a tremendous amount of space junk or debris, and many are worried about the potential of a ‘Kessler syndrome’, which is being described as “an ecological tipping point” for certain orbits...And yeah, just wanting listeners to think about the hubris that got us to the point where we’ve managed to litter parts of the universe that we will never physically exist in, and what that says about allowing private companies to sort of run wild in the pursuit of development and advancement?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Yeah, again, I mean, we know that companies, you know, “running wild” in pursuit of development and advancement, we know what that looks like here on Earth. We've been through that we've actually run that experiment already. Right. And so people might say, okay, but like, you know, we don't have to worry about that happening in space. Except, of course, we do. Even in the astronomy community, we're now having to deal with the fallout from these satellites that Elon Musk has decided to launch that ostensibly, the official claim is that they're launching these satellites so that they can give internet to rural areas, but I don't believe for a second that they do anything out of the goodness of their hearts, right. And I am not sure why I should believe that that's the only reason they're launching these satellites.
But what we're dealing with in the astronomy community is that they're actually getting into our images. So now our ground based telescopes aren't as useful as they were. And it's incredible that just again, a really small group of people got to make that decision on behalf of all of humanity, about what our night sky would look like about what kinds of images we could even take with our telescopes. And so now, we actually have to divert resources to creating a computational pipeline that will take the satellites out of our images, and it won't be perfect. And so actually, our ability to see the night sky to actually see the universe with clarity has already been diminished just in the last couple of years. And this is only going to get worse, Jeff Bezos, his company has also been given permission to launch these kinds of satellites, we're literally just going to fill our sky with, you know, what I think about is it's like buying lots of little plastic trinkets and filling your house with lots of little plastic trinkets. Because like they're shiny, and we feel like they do something for us. But we don't ask what it does to us, or certainly the people who are doing this don't seem to care about what it does to the rest of us, that they are doing this, I feel there isn't good enough government regulation around this. And I worry a lot about people going out and they're gonna mine this asteroid, and they’re gonna be on the moon doing this, and on Mars doing, and I’m actually really grateful to the people who made the show the Expanse, because I think it provides actually, like a painfully realistic vision of what our future could be like, if, you know, those of us who are thinking about this don't urge more movement-building to resist that kind of future. And of course, like there's, you know, an incredible irony that the Expanse is exclusively available on Amazon. But, that really tells us like, in some sense, like how all of these things are kind of tied together. That the same people are controlling what kinds of critique we see. And when it's no longer valuable for us to have access to critical storytelling like the Expanse, maybe we just don't see it anymore, because like Jeff Bezos decides, he doesn't want us to see it. That's a real thing that we have to think about.
Ayana Young Yeah. Thank you so much for making those connections for us. And I remember a few weeks ago, or maybe a month ago now, I was outside, it was a beautiful, clear winter evening. And the stars were bright. And yeah, it was just one of those nights that was so phenomenal. And all of a sudden, I see this line of satellites. And I felt so I don't know what the word is like? Well impacted for sure. But like, wait a minute, how can, and I believe they were the Elon Musk internet satellites. I forget the name of that project. But I want to say Starlink? Yes, yes. And so I was like, “What the hell, like, what am I looking at? How did they get permission to litter everybody's night sky?” I mean, this is crazy to literally change what we see when we look up to the sky, I mean, I know I'm not speaking very clearly about this, because it's, it was actually quite emotional for me to feel so impacted by this and also, not exploited, but yeah, just like, “Wait, how did you get into this space?” And so I am so happy we talked about this, because it's been something on my mind. And I really did feel this heartbreak and also a sense of, we may never come back from this in my lifetime. Like, if this is just the beginning, our whole sky is going to be gridded. Our whole planet will literally be encapsulated by a grid of satellites. And what does that say about our relationship to this Earth? I mean, it was really shocking. So anyways, thank you for hearing my process a little bit about that, because I haven't been able to express the fear and the pain of seeing that.
But yeah, and I'm just thinking about tying this into our conversation on colonial legacy, the sort of current-day militarism that is really rampant in certain sectors of astronomy. And in The Disordered Cosmos, you speak about this history and how astronomy has been funded throughout the ages; you know in the eighteenth century it was proposed as a tool that would make the slave trade and global economy more efficient, and so now I’m wondering if you could share a bit about the sort of underbelly of it in terms of the military-industrial complex?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Yeah, I mean, I feel like people like people can like read sort of my critiques of science, and walk away thinking that I just like really hate science and all of that, but I am still actually like in science, most of my day job is, you know, I spend the day doing science, like when we're done with this recording, I will go back to doing scientific work. I think my call is really for us to be more honest about how science has been used. And I think that, you know, just tying this into the way that you felt, and having your experience with the night sky disrupted by these artificial objects that, you know, again, just a few people got to make the decision to launch into the sky on behalf of everyone else. That there have been incidents like that throughout history, where a few people have decided to use our scientific knowledge to negatively impact other people's experiences and to decide, you know, what, actually, it's okay for me to negatively impact your experience because I'm profiting from it. Right?
We can't change that habit, if we won't talk about the fact that it exists. We can't change the fact that this is a tendency in the scientific community, unless we talk about the fact that it's a tendency of the scientific community. So you can't address a problem if you wont admit that there is one. And that's really what I'm calling people's attention to is that we need to pay attention to the way that slavery and science were sometimes entangled with one another. The way that science benefited from slavery on expeditions, the way that it was used, like astronomical knowledge was used to make ships more efficient in you know, taking kidnapped people to enslavement, and then taking the goods that enslaved people were forced to produce back to Europe and distributing them. And similarly, to be honest about the way that astronomy has benefited from American colonialism in Hawaii, for over 100 years now, colonialism has been there and that for really like over at this point, I guess, like 60 years or so that professional astronomers have been capitalizing on that by building on Hawaiian land, and we have no way of knowing if the Hawaiian ruling family would have been okay, with the kind of building that has happened on Mauna Kea, some astronomers like to argue that that would have been fine, because one time the King allowed and a telescope that was easy to carry away to be placed there. But it's very different, you know, it's very different if I take a telescope in my backyard, versus if I decide to build an observatory in my backyard, right? Like one I don't need the city's permission to do and the other I do need the city's permission to do, they're fundamentally different phenomena. And we can't really confront what that says about the history of the scientific community if we don't talk about it.
Ayana Young Absolutely. In The Disordered Cosmos you explore the future reality that science doesn’t have to be inherently colonial, or in the interest of commodification and imperialism. And, I’d like to delve in this a little bit deeper, because I know a lot of folks have argued that science is fundamentally colonial, and what it does is colonize those who enter into the field, but I think there is beauty and importance in us knowing the world around us, and for many, that does come in the form of academic pursuit and understanding, and so the call to reclaim this space and thought is vital. So, what do alternative ways of being in science look like and how is this also, really a conversation about reclaiming heritage and forms of literacy that have been negated?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein The word science has so many different meanings, right? Sometimes when we say science, we mean the scientific community, sometimes we're referring to a collection of facts that are widely accepted by people who are members of that professional community. Sometimes we're talking about specific techniques. So I think that there are things in there that should be I don't know if salvaged is the right word. But certainly, I am a fan of empiricism. I think it can help us as I said earlier, it can help us tell stories about the universe, I think, you know, as I said, we're a storytelling species, right? So that part, we need to hang on to you. And we need to acknowledge that actually, it's something that people have done in different communities around the world for a while. And that, you know, there are different astronomical systems in different communities. And if we're interested in pursuing this mathematical tale, there's something really beautiful about that. But then we have to really rethink like, what are the conditions in which we do these things? Why does particle physics or cosmology receive funding? Where does the funding come from? Like, who are we dependent on? Increasingly, we're dependent on private foundations. And while I've received money from a private foundation, and I’ve had like a really great relationship with the folks at that foundation, at the end of the day, I truly think that this should be a public mission and that the funding should come from, from the public from shared resources, where the community has made the decision together, that this is something that we value, and we want to send people off to think about these questions and bring back their findings. So I don't think that there is a simple conversation to be had here where science is all good, or science is all bad. I think science is a social phenomenon. And it's made up of people and what science ends up doing reflects who we are and what we end up doing. So the conversation we have to have is about what are our values around using science, what are our values as scientists, and how are we going to enact those in our lives and what impact do they have on other people?
Ayana Young Absolutely. And also there is something that, you know, I was thinking about with this scientific endeavor and reclaiming curiosity, and it almost feels like reclaiming curiosity and the profit, well, I mean, I know what I’m saying - it’s so simple, but it’s just not coming out, but-
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that like, we just need to rethink what we do with our own curiosity. There really is like, I agree with you like, it really is just that simple, which is like, sure, it's great to be curious, but also, if you're curious, be aware that your curiosity can lead you into complicated moral and ethical places. And if we don't have a strong framework that gives people guidance on how to handle themselves in those situations, bad things can happen.
Ayana Young Right, it's like having a framework that's actually intersectional and holds people accountable so that the curiosity doesn't spin-off and to these horrific hubris projects. And that's interesting because it seems like the field of science, or at least I don't know, of a type of intersectional framework in which people have to work underneath like an agreement that if you're receiving funding, and if you're in this academic field, and you're invited in, there are certain moral and ethical, and honestly, spiritual understandings of how the curiosity is funneled through. But I mean, I, it's hard to say, because I'm sure that there could be a lot of rebuttal to what I just said, and if you have any, please do share that with me. But yeah, I think this is really important. It's just important, but I think-
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein One of the things that we're thinking about is whose curiosity matters, right? I keep banging on about how there's a small group of people who are making decisions for everybody else. So why is it that one person who, you know, started a startup, like 20 years ago, and, you know, had good stock options, or whatever, is suddenly allowed to make all of these decisions for the rest of the planet? And why isn't the curiosity if someone who wasn't in a position to access the same resources equally valuable, it's fine for like Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos to be curious people, to encourage curiosity in everyone, what becomes problematic is when some people have more power to pursue that curiosity and exercise control over other people's curiosity in a completely undemocratic way.
Ayana Young I'm just thinking about the word curiosity and imagination. And so much of what we talk about on the podcast is being able to imagine another world, being able to imagine a culture beyond capitalism, for instance. And if the people who are actually funded and supported, are curious about extraction, then that's what we're gonna get, because the folks who are really pushing the imagination towards a more equitable world, like that isn't what's being uplifted and supported by the dominant culture. And so we can really see how things unfold and whose curiosity gets supported versus not and why that is. And at the end of the book, you speak about the politics of suffering and the way that feeds into a lack of imagination, and these topics of radical imagination, joy, and just a simple call to revere our humanity are still as sentient as ever. Can you speak a bit to the reality that we have everything to gain when we release white supremacy and start to inhabit mental, spiritual, and emotional states that have been historically disavowed in the Western educational setting?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein I mean, I guess I would say I agree with you that we have everything to gain when we relinquish the social boundaries, and power relations that are set up to disempower some in favor of empowering others. And I do think that there will be some people who will experience it as a loss because if you have too much power, relative to other people, then some of the power is going to be taken away from you. I hope that people will be able to appreciate that that means that other people can live better and that there is less suffering. And that's important. Whether or not it feels like a personal gain or not, and that actually we need to move away from everything needing to feel like a personal gain in order to be important, right? So I definitely think that that's one element of this. And then I agree that people need to feel fortified in their own cultural context and we need to get away from narratives that tell us that Western society is the most valuable society. And when I say Western society, of course, there are lots of people in Western society who aren't white. But Western society is really kind of a proxy for like, socially dominated by people who can exist comfortably in the tent of whiteness, or people who can exist in the tent of whiteness in some way, right? There's something really damaging about telling people that their ancestors weren't enough. And the logical conclusion of it is kind of horrifying, which is that you do occasionally run into people walking around saying, “Well, you know, it's good that my ancestors were enslaved, because otherwise I would be backwards.” Right? Like, that's kind of, that's always the implication whether people are comfortable with articulating that or not, which is that colonialism was necessary to civilize us. And so I think, if we can get out of this mental framing of things as we need to, we need it to be civilized, that our ancestors needed to be civilized, that we can actually really start to learn more about ourselves as a species and learn more about our world, and how to live cooperatively with the ecosystems that we find ourselves in.
One thing that I found really compelling is that I was learning from Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiians, during their struggle, during the height of their struggle around Mauna Kea and the 30 meter telescope a few years ago, was that the cultural context for them was that the land is like the family member. And I just keep thinking over and over again, what if this was a value that had shaped people's reaction to what we now call industrialization? What if it had been a key piece that that land has to be treated like a family member that it has to be treated like it is living and breathing and requires respect? Would we be in the same global warming mess? I think the answer is no. And that really raises questions about our understanding of technology in a Western context, which is that like, actually, maybe Western technologists don't actually know how to use the technology in a sustainable way. And that's a scientific fault. In some sense. It's almost like you don't know how to turn it on in a way that optimizes it. Because I'm not sure destroying the Earth is optimizing.
Ayana Young I want to talk a bit about accessibility in terms of our right to the sky. Humans have always turned to the heavens for both practical matters, like direction and orientation, as well as philosophical matters, making sense of the world, communicating with the divine, and imagining what exists beyond our reach. And lately, I really think about how our right to know the land, our cosmologies, etc. is one of the strongest ways to be in right relationship with the universe really...but this can’t be oversimplified, there are so many structures that feed into this, it’s your basic needs being met, it’s a network of relationships, and so on and I wonder if you could elaborate on this a bit further and how this understanding of comprehensive accessibility feeds into your work?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Yeah, so certainly one of the core themes running through the book is the right to know and love the night sky. And, you know, as we've discussed in this conversation, we've ranged over a variety of ways that people engage with the night sky, even you talked about your experience of wanting to just look up and having it disrupted. And, you know, maybe there's a limit to the framework of the liberal Western framework of rights as kind of our analytic standpoint. But I do think at the end of the day, that that encompasses a lot of different things. What do you need to be able to see the night sky? Well, maybe you need to be able to get away from a light-polluted city? Do you have the resources to go out into the countryside? And do you have the resources means do you have access transportation? Do you have the time off? Is it safe for you? Do you have enough food and water? Are you able to take food and water with you? Do you have the kinds of resources to plan your meals ahead like that, there are so many different things that need to be lined up so that people can just simply have that moment with the sky, including is the sky visible, right?
But I actually think, thinking in those terms of our relationship to the sky, I agree with you, whether or not you believe in the supernatural, that our relationship with it is on some level, divine and certainly philosophical. And we need to be really careful about how we strip ourselves of some aspect of our humanity if we disrupt that relationship in very dramatic ways, which is something that has been happening, particularly to people who are Indigenous, especially over the last five centuries, whether those people are Indigenous Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the Americas to be enslaved, or whether those are Indigenous people who were in the Americas whose land was being colonized, and the enslaved were being forced to work it, right? Even just talking in that kind of North South American context, we have had our relationship with the sky disrupted by colonialism and slavery. And I want to encourage people to reclaim that and also to acknowledge that enslaved people must have been looking at the sky too. And we knew that they were because some of them reported using the North Star to get themselves to freedom. It's widely believed that Harriet Tubman was one of those people, and that she potentially used that to both liberate herself and as an underground railroad conductor to go back and liberate others. So the night sky can be part of our liberation discourse, and not just part of our fears about what technology is doing to us.
Ayana Young Wow, that was so beautiful and relieving to hear. Yeah, makes me think about what we were talking about in the beginning of the conversation, how theoretical cosmology is really a form of storytelling. And I'm wondering if there's any stories that come to mind for you. I don't know that that represents a liberatory path, or I don't know, just something that you'd like to share about connecting the storytelling element.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein I guess I will just say that for me seeing the Milky Way, like the full Milky Way from Chile in the Atacama Desert, which I know has its own history of complexity with the colonial government, and what has happened with the Atacameño people there. It was a magical moment. I'm not a supernatural believer, I don't believe in magic, but it felt like a magical moment. And it was also in that moment that I realized that I had been denied that experience because of the resources I had access to because of the way that light pollution has shaped our environments here in the United States. And I think that it just made me really think deeply about like, what is it I want for other members of the Black community? What do I want for Black children, and I want for Black children to have that sky. Because so, Chile's in the southern hemisphere. And so the sky is a little bit different than what I expect my ancestors in Africa looked at in the Northern Hemisphere. But my ancestors saw a sky like that. And I realized that I had never understood what the world looked like to them, that I had never thought about what the world looked like to them and never thought about the fact that there's no way you could see a sky like that and not think about it. Whereas growing up in Los Angeles, you can see the sky and be like, okay, it's not very impressive. It has a moon, maybe Venus is hanging around, maybe you can see like one or two stars, right. But you're not really being like, “Whoa, that must have really shaped the way people thought everything in their world.” But when you see the Milky Way, for the first time, you realize that this has shaped so many people's lives for so many generations behind you, and that we are just woefully disconnected from that experience. And I think part of reclaiming ourselves away from the damage that enslavement has done to us is to have that experience of seeing what our ancestors saw.
Ayana Young That was so beautiful Chanda, and as we come to a close I want to linger on what you brought up a little bit longer, and The Disordered Cosmos begins and ends with the question of freedom and where we are going, and you point out that cosmology in itself requires “multigenerational patience”, and I think our conversation has alluded to this multigeneration patience in many forms and genealogies, but I’d like to end by asking you, as you dream into the future, what does this course of thought like in terms of scientific thought, physics, of even, universe literacy?
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein I mean, I want us to think again about what resources do people need to get to the point of being able to see a sky like that? So what health care do people need? What wages for housework do poor moms need? What schooling free of racist patriarchal violence do children need? What do we need to create the conditions where people feel liberated from the everyday concerns that tend to take up space unnecessarily from them worrying about where their medication is going to come from, where their food is going to come from, whether they're going to remain housed? All of these things feed into giving people the conditions where they can just look up at the night sky, and enjoy themselves. Enjoy it.
Ayana Young Well, thank you for stating that dream. And I think a lot of people are holding that as well. And yeah, thank you so much for such an expansive conversation. And if there's anything that you would like to mention, before we close if there's anything, any topics we weren't able to cover, I really love hearing you speak. Just thinking about all the things that we've been talking about.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein No, I think that was a great conversation and thank you so much for having me on the show.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Harrison Foster, Amaara, and Jahnavi Veronica. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.