Making Earth Cool collective celebrates 5 years of art and activism

Just over five years ago, Sarah Baker created an Instagram account that they hoped would evolve into something more. A couple of months later, they had connected with some other activists and filmmakers and launched a film festival of Earth Day shorts in 2020 — just weeks after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Five years later, the group of volunteer creatives say they are Making Earth Cool with a “collective that creates content and events using science, comedy & creativity to educate & inspire people to be better stewards of our only home, Earth.”

Baker joins us to talk about this year’s screening of short films and the community activities MEC is spearheading, including a parade later in the week and what it calls a kind of spiritual “Earth Ceremony.”

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. It started with an Instagram account; about five years ago, Sarah Baker created the Making Earth Cool account. Then it grew from there. Baker has now connected with other activists and filmmakers, turning Making Earth Cool into what they call a “collective that creates content and events using science, comedy, and creativity to educate and inspire people to be better stewards of our only home, Earth.” Today is Earth Day. They’ll be hosting a film festival called Earth Day Shorts at Portland’s Tomorrow Theater on Thursday and a series of events in Portland on Saturday.

Sarah Baker joins me now. It’s great to have you on the show.

Sarah Baker: Thank you so much. Happy birthday to everybody. Happy birthday to the Earth.

Miller: Where did the idea for Making Earth Cool come from?

Baker: Making Earth Cool came from … I work in the advertising industry and it’s a job that has a lot of collaboration but also a lot of waste. We’re also creating stuff, content that sells people stuff that they don’t need. So I was like, well, what if we can sell people on the wonderful Earth that we live on, and getting excited and engaged to participate in what can often be a really scary topic? It can be that conversation at the party that nobody wants to go there, but we all need to go there. So I thought if we could create this way that we could talk about it that’s playful and fun but also brings in the seriousness of it, that could be a gateway for folks to get involved and want to do more.

Miller: Am I reading too much into this? The way you started talking about working in advertising and helping people to sell stuff, maybe stuff they don’t even need … was part of this just some ambivalence about your day job?

Baker: [Laughs] No. In the film industry in particular, people work really hard for free a lot, just to get their foot in the door and also to get their own creative vision out there. Also, just marrying the fact that I do a lot of activism and mutual aid work in the community, I was like, I’m already spending a lot of time, so how can I merge all of my loves into one? I also knew that I could really tap my creative community to participate with me and I knew that this is something that we all care about. It just was kind of like, let’s bring it all together. In the sense of being efficient with time and having the greatest impact, this felt like the right way to go.

Miller: How did you get people to start taking this on, as a pretty time-consuming volunteer project?

Baker: Yeah, for some of us it’s our second full-time job. Just really looking for folks that are already talking about it; waste is something that is just constantly a conversation, definitely in the production industry world. But yeah, just keeping my eyes out. I’m the person at the party who’s like, “Hey, we’ve got this thing, would you like to volunteer? Do you want to come be a part of this?” And just looking for those yeses.

Miller: You mentioned also, speaking of parties, that people don’t necessarily want to talk about climate change. And not uniformly, but often, climate change activism, there’s been a kind of earnestness to it. It seems like, at the center of your project, is to change the tone of climate activism. So what have you seen in the past and what is the vibe that you wanted to create?

Baker: Yeah, I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and I was an MTV kid, a Nickelodeon kid. I really remember there was a time when caring for the Earth was cool. MTV had a whole campaign around it, there were these different … the “Muppets,” “Sesame Street,” they always touched upon it. Anytime that I saw that, I saw the power of coolness.

Being a part of the climate activist movement and seeing that there’s a lot of scientists, there’s a lot of folks that are really serious and they have the facts, but when I look at their graphics or when I look at their videos, it’s like, where’s the razzle-dazzle that really gets me excited? I felt like that was something that I could really bring that I wasn’t seeing yet. And I also knew that a lot of other folks would see that as something they want to do, too.

Miller: Obviously, Making Earth Cool, there is a very clear two meanings there. But trying to actually make something cool, it seems really hard because effortlessness I think of as one of the hallmarks of standard coolness. If you’re trying too hard, it falls apart immediately. How do you try? How do you effectively be cool at something?

Baker: Well, I think the “making” is the key word there. We’re doing it. We’re just getting together, we’re having fun and people just keep joining in. So I’d say it’s really about just like … I used to always throw dance parties and I learned that there always needs to be that one person that’s on the dance floor to get the dance party started. I was like, “I can be that for this.” And really, we’ve got a pretty crowded dance floor, but luckily the capacity is infinity. Hopefully, more and more people keep seeing their friends doing it, and they want to bring something to what we’re creating too.

That’s another really great thing about the work that we’re doing is it’s not limited to video, it’s not limited to events. It really is limitless because it’s really about what the volunteers bring into the project. If someone has an idea and there’s enough momentum around it, let’s make it happen.

Miller: What is going to happen? What can people expect at the Tomorrow Theater on Thursday?

Baker: This will be our, I believe, fourth Earth Day Shorts, Earth Shorts for Earth Day. To start out the show, we’ve got some kids’ films that were entered and then we also are going to screen our “Earth News” episode on beavers. Then we will go into the competition portion of the show and that will be films from all local Oregon filmmakers. It’ll be professional filmmakers and then also more DIY stuff, lots of silliness and also some more serious or artistic pieces.

Miller: You mentioned um “Earth News.” What is that?

Baker: “Earth News” is our series that focuses on both the flora and fauna and the climate movement of the Pacific Northwest. It’s an ongoing project; there’s a group of us that keep coming together to make this happen. It started with a video called “Be the Change,” which was more of a PSA about getting folks to not use pesticides in the yards and protect the bees that keep us fed. Then we transitioned into the more classic “Earth News” program, and that’s kind of a play between “Muppets” and a “Saturday Night Live” news show. We’ve got costumes and we bring in [guests]; the episode that we’re going to screen has an interview with Meg Waller from Bark. Just getting people excited about some specific things that are happening here, also maybe teaching a little bit of history and giving opportunities to engage.

Miller: Let’s have a listen to part of that beaver episode.

[Clip from “Earth News” playing]

Voice 1: Aside from being super cute, I’ve heard that beavers are a keystone species. Is that true?

Voice 2: They are, they’re super important to the ecosystem.

Voice 1: What’s a keystone species?

Voice 2: Similar to an arch, you have a stone in the middle that keeps the arch together. If you take beavers out of the ecosystem, everything else crumbles. They’re super important ecosystem engineers. So they create wetlands that foster biodiversity, store water for humans, animals and agriculture. They create wetlands that are fire breaks and seed banks for after those fires come through. The benefits are limitless.

Voice 1: Wow, beavers are so important!

[Clip ends]

Miller: Who do you think of as your audiences?

Baker: Everybody. It really is shown in who comes to our events and the way that people respond to it. Obviously, it’s great for kids. And a lot of the folks in my generation, there are nods to some of the creative influences that we grew up with – like I said, the “Muppets” and “Sesame Street.”

Miller: Pee-wee Herman?

Baker: Peewee Herman for sure. Peewee Herman is a great example where Peewee spoke both to the kids and to every adult, and then on. We really want it to be something that there’s different layers, that’s speaking to all the different generations.

Miller: I want to play one more clip; this is from one of the short films that’s in the festival on Thursday. This is by Mike Schwab. It’s called “A Planetary Perspective.” In the lead up to this, some friends are hanging out in the woods, smoking and drinking, throwing their beer cans and cigarette butts around, and then saying they hate trees over and over. Then, because of their bad actions, they basically get transported to Mars. That’s where this picks up.

[Clip from “A Planetary Perspective” playing]

VAL: Welcome to Mars, your new home. I’m VAL, a vigilant algorithmic logic machine. I’ve been watching you and I don’t like what I’ve seen.

Human 1: Nice joke.

VAL: Spacesuits will arrive soon. You will be able to venture out to start your new lives.

Human 2: Uh, no, this isn’t any kind of place to live in.

Human 3: Yeah, we’ll pass.

Human 1: Yeah, this has been interesting, but you could send us back to Earth now.

VAL: No can do, James. You lost your earth privileges permanently.

Human 3: What?

VAL: My earth monitoring system observed you. It saw you disrespecting Earth’s environment. Therefore, you’re no longer welcome there.

[Clip ends]

Miller: What role do you think that art and creativity can play in political movements?

Baker: Oh, I think that they’re so essential. I think that if you look to any movement in history, art has played a role. An example that I really love is protest clowns, just folks that came and brought some silliness into some really serious dynamics. I think that especially for what we are all fighting for, what I find myself fighting for, is the future. For children in particular, getting to see color and art, and people being creative and adults being silly, or adults being experimental and outside of structures that we live in, really brings down the level of overall scariness and really creates something that is just beautiful and inspiring.

Miller: On Saturday, there’s going to be a parade and then Saturday evening you have something called Earth Ceremony at the Groves Church in Southeast Portland. What is an Earth Ceremony?

Baker: The Earth Ceremony came from just multiple conversations that we’ve had as a group, with folks in our community looking for a spiritual connection. It’s a non-secular gathering. It is definitely pulling from different traditions within churches and synagogues, depending on who our collaborators are for that particular ceremony. This will be our third. We just want to create a space that people can connect with each other and share on a maybe more emotional level. There’s going to be a lot of group singing and a lot of beautiful poetry. It’s a space to honor the earth and worship all the wonderful, beautiful things that she gives to us.

Miller: We’ve talked about coolness, joy and creativity. You mentioned the connection to dance. You haven’t said the word “grief” yet, but for a lot of people, climate grief is very real and can be almost literally debilitating, certainly it can be enough that it saps people’s ability sometimes to remain activists. I’m curious how you think about climate grief in the context of the work you are doing.

Baker: Actually, we’ve done a number of funerals for the Earth, which were gatherings of folks dressed all in black. And we created a sort of cart hearse and had the earth on it and have had bagpipes at one of them. It has been a really powerful emotional processing experience for all the folks that have participated in those. It is super essential to honor the grief aspect of the work that we do.

I talk about being MEC, Making Earth Cool, being like my therapy, and it is definitely my way of processing my own grief and fear about all that we’ve lost and all that we’re losing. I think that that is a nice thing, too, about what our ceremony really offers: a space for grief, and really brings it more into where I think art and emotional processing come together.

Miller: Sarah, thanks very much.

Baker: Thank you.

Miller: That’s Sarah Baker, founder and one of the organizers of the creative collective Making Earth cool.

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