This is part of a series of blog posts highlighting objects and archival documents from Social Climates: Power and the Environment in the Archives, an exhibition currently on view in the Kempner Gallery at Columbia’s RBML. Drawing on a wide array of RBML collections and materials, Social Climates explores the interconnections between culture, history, politics, and the natural world.
The following is adapted from the Social Climates exhibit essay text by Melina Moe, Curator of Literature.
“We used to say, ‘You can’t be it, if you you can’t see,”’ begins the collaboration between artist Molly Crabapple, writer Avi Lewis, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These original ink and watercolor compositions, script pages, and storyboards are drawn from a video imagining the economic, political, and environmental transformation that might follow the passage of a Green New Deal.
The video, in which Ocasio-Cortez addresses her young niece Zierra, recounts the next twenty years from an imaginary future in which energy production is sustainable, care work is valued, and Native knowledge guides land management practices. A new generation of political leaders, led by children who first saw themselves in the historically diverse 2019 Congress, guided a simultaneous political and environmental transformation. Because, as the video concludes, “We can be whatever we have the courage to see.”
This collection links environmental narratives and political change to the act of imagination. “A Message from the Future” is a new addition to the RBML collections and was purchased using the Francis Henne fund, which was established to enrich Columbia’s children’s literature collections. “A Message from the Future” represents a 21st-century example of how addressing young audiences is foundational to the ongoing collective project of political and social self-making. In “A Message from the Future,” Ocasio-Cortez encourages the children in NY’s 14th District—as well as those in Ilhan Omar’s Minnesota 5th and Cori Bush’s Missouri 1st, and so on— to courageously imagine a more just and sustainable future, and the political work it will take to achieve it.
