Women Born In The 1980s

"Whatever your theory is, keep the cliché condolences to yourself. No one will be uttering, “Sorry for your loss” in Wanda’s world."

"There are people skills that you develop, there's a lot of empathy you build, there’s a lot of putting yourself in other people's shoes. And what you put in is what you receive! There's just so much that you get from working with a group of people intimately, and that's one of my favorite aspects of the job."

"I think every day you try to soak up as much as you can to learn and understand things better."

"I believe that you are only in control of so much. So whatever you are not in control of you can’t worry about."

"Enjoy the little things in life."

"What keeps you confident in a healthy way is knowing that everyone else around you is going to support you and teach you and you're going to learn from them. I just feel open to learning from people."

"If you don't like something, talk about something else that's great and maybe someone else will discover it and think it's great too."

"People don’t need careers. People should just exist."

"I was 10 and I was curious about auditioning … and I realized very quickly it wasn't for me because I was missing my sports teams, my dance class and all the extracurricular activities at school. But during that time, I thought, 'I don't want to be associated with [Mary-Kate and Ashley],' for some reason. I guess I understood what nepotism was like inherently as a 10-year-old. I don't know if I knew the word, but there is some sort of association of not earning something that I think bothered me at a very young age."

"I'd like to be more like her where I am always emotional. But to be in this world and to be able to function in it, we should probably put on our layers of socially correct behaviour."

"I think it's important not to believe anyone when they tell you're good; maybe that's not healthy. But I think if you start to think of yourself the way that people you that you work with speak to you, then that's dangerous."

"The struggle comes when you're displaced, when someone is in an industry where they worry about people taking advantage and they don't know what to do with that. I've been lucky not having to worry about that aspect of it as well."

"When I was 13, I told my parents I didn’t believe in God any more. I wanted to be an atheist because I believed that religion should be about community and having a place to go in prayer, not something that should determine women’s freedoms."

"I like being able to play make believe as my job. I think I played make-believe growing up a little too long—probably to an inappropriate age. I played make-believe until I was, like, 13 and probably should have been doing something else. But other than that, it’s fun to be able to have to learn about different people. My favorite thing is you have to learn how to work with people that you probably would never try [to]. Some people just aren’t supposed to be in a room together, and you have to be in a room with a group of people who might not all get along and you have to figure out how to come together for one thing. That collaboration is special, and people don’t get to exercise that. I think that’s why people become stubborn, and I think that’s why people become uninspired to change. In this job you have to."

"I don’t have faith, but I was touched by Suzanne’s. Despite her love for God, she feels that the monastic life is not for her, and she does everything she can to escape it. She never plays the victim in her trials. I was impressed by the pride and dignity she maintains. Suzanne taught me a great deal."

"When you start very young and you don’t have a sense of who you are yet, which you shouldn’t, because you are not yet a grown person—a child or an adolescent—you can sometimes sort of take on the personalities of your characters, or become very lost in who you are as yourself, because you haven’t had time to develop as your own person, because you have been spending all this time developing other people and characters."

"I think I always had a performer somewhere inside of me, even though, believe it or not, I was quite shy in high school and before that I had a very shy side that I didn’t really shed until my first year at Columbia University. Like much of my freshman class, I thought at the time that I was going to go work on Wall Street. That’s what I wanted to do. I figured I’d wear a power suit, carry a briefcase and trade and yell and buy low and sell high. I always say, though, that no matter what career I chose, I think I would have been happy because I’m a happy person and I’d want to choose something that I enjoy doing. I consider myself extremely fortunate that I’m in the position that I’m in now because I do love what I do, but it was something that wasn’t really a part of my life until I moved to New York and was at school."

"It’s a lot less consistent work, but I think with movies, you get to do such a huge range of emotions as a character, where as TV, you kind of stay on the same page. But I’d be happy with either"

"I try and do as much as I can in terms of giving my time when I have it cause it's like I get to live this life going new places, meeting new people and as hard as it is I mean I get an opportunity that a lot of people don't get to have so when I can do something and lend my time and make people happier or send a message and more people will see because I'm on TV. I mean, that's so key and I think everyone should keep that when there in a position like mine or definitely a position above mine. I mean you gotta give back I've been lucky enough to get so much that I have to give back. I don't know what I would do if I didn't give back so um, all those I mean any organization that's willing to lend time and really help people is so important and so great."

"Never quit. You can’t wait for yourself to happen, you have to go out there and make it happen. If you truly believe in something you can make it happen. Get a good agent. They cost money, but that’s your first step. Your first film opportunities will most likely not be big, but that’s how you’re discovered by others. Eventually a director or a casting director will see you in a minor film/commercial/broadway, etc. and you’ll get your big break. Always be polite and professional. There are often many, many other people auditioning for the same part as you. If you’re not polite or professional they won’t even waste their time with you."

"this idea that we can be motivated by love, I think it’s just — it’s just the more delightful way to approach something that is the work of our lifetimes: to do it, thinking about not just the love of other species, but the love of other humans, the love of ecosystems, the love of places. I mean, we all have places that we’re deeply attached to, and many of them are changing for the worse. And so this potential to have that be our driving force is, to me, why I focus on solutions instead of raging against the machine."

"the fact that we have so many Americans who can't follow their dreams because they know that their first responsibility is to protect their communities is just gut wrenching to me."

"I decided to write this because the environmental community was initially really silent on Black Lives Matter."

"People talk about climate justice as the intersection between race and climate because people of color are more strongly affected by the impacts of climate change - whether that's storms or droughts or heat waves."

"this op-ed, for me, really grew out of a moment where I was just like, I can't. I just can't charge ahead. I have to stop and pay attention to what is happening in this country. And I hope that that is something that hit a lot of people - that business as usual is just not an option anymore. This is obviously an inflection point in American history."

"to white people who care about maintaining a habitable planet, I need you to become actively anti-racist. I need you to understand that our racial inequality crisis is intertwined with our climate crisis. If we don’t work on both, we will succeed at neither. I need you to step up. Please. Because I am exhausted."

"People of color disproportionately bear climate impacts, from storms to heat waves to pollution. Fossil-fueled power plants and refineries are disproportionately located in black neighborhoods, leading to poor air quality and putting people at higher risk for coronavirus. Such issues are finally being covered in the news media more fully."

"Even at its most benign, racism is incredibly time consuming. Black people don’t want to be protesting for our basic rights to live and breathe. We don’t want to constantly justify our existence. Racism, injustice and police brutality are awful on their own, but are additionally pernicious because of the brain power and creative hours they steal from us. I think of one black friend of mine who wanted to be an astronomer, but gave up that dream because organizing for social justice was more pressing. Consider the discoveries not made, the books not written, the ecosystems not protected, the art not created, the gardens not tended."

"How can we expect black Americans to focus on climate when we are so at risk on our streets, in our communities, and even within our own homes? How can people of color effectively lead their communities on climate solutions when faced with pervasive and life-shortening racism?"

"As a marine biologist and policy nerd, building community around climate solutions is my life’s work. But I’m also a black person in the United States of America. I work on one existential crisis, but these days I can’t concentrate because of another."

"this is a chickens-coming-home-to-roost moment. And I’m seeing a lot of my friends who — sort of aware, of course, that climate change is happening, but hasn’t really, like, hit them — we’re seeing people wake up right now."

"when I and other ocean policy folks looked at the Green New Deal, we realized the ocean and all the solutions it’s trying to offer us for how to address the climate crisis were essentially left out."

"The ocean produces about half of the oxygen we breathe. It has also already absorbed about a third of the carbon dioxide that we have emitted by burning fossil fuels, which has turned the ocean more acidic than it has been in human history. So we have an increasingly acidic ocean, an increasingly warmer ocean. That’s very bad for the creatures that are trying to live in there. Some are trying to flee towards the poles, when they can move, like fish. Others, like corals, are often now frying in place. So we have just a very different ocean than we had even a hundred years ago."

"Katharine and I decided to put together this anthology to bring a whole new cadre of climate leaders to the fore, to expand the number of voices people were looking to in times of crisis, to share the wisdom from women climate leaders, and to have this focus on solutions, as the subtitle reflects, that this is about truth, courage and solutions, not like doom, gloom and give up, but really thinking about what’s next for the climate movement and the need for it to be a very leaderful movement if we’re going to succeed."

"We are simply not seeing very much climate coverage at all in the mainstream media. What we see is last year about 0.4% of the major news shows’ minutes were about climate, 0.4%. So we’re not talking about what we’re supposed to do. And only 30% of the coverage that does exist on climate in major news outlets talks about solutions. So we’re just not having the deep conversations about what we do next."

"The word that I’ve started using more and more is “transformation,” because we’ve talked about a transition away from fossil fuels; we’ve talked about what we’re going to stop doing; we’ve talked about how we need to do other stuff. But I think the word “transformation” has embedded within it the sense of possibility: what are we going to become?"

"if you’re motivated purely by counting pennies and not by saving life on Earth, then we’re just not speaking the same language."

"I think it’s so funny that people say it’s too expensive to solve climate change, because it’s just like, what’s your alternative?"

"I think it’s also deeply unwise to have so much dependence on one person, who could be assassinated, as we’ve seen in civil rights movements; who could burn out, as we’ve seen in environmental movements; who might just want to take a break and have a family. So I think this is a moment that calls for many leaders, because what we need is transformation in every community, in every sector of the economy, in every ecosystem, with the hundreds of climate solutions we have."

"that’s something that Naomi Klein talks about a lot, is how we are sort of in this moment where imagination is one of the most valuable things we can bring to the table. And a failure of imagination means a failure of the spectrum of futures that are available to us. And I just, I like to think of — so I remind myself and others that there is still such a wide spectrum of possible futures, and we do get some choice in which ones we have."

"I think that climate communication has focused too much on the problem...I focus on the getting our act together part, because I think that’s the pivot that we need right now. We have more than enough information. I’m grateful for the science, and it’s helping us make more nuanced and clear decisions, but the broad strokes that everyone needs to pitch in, have been there for a long time."

"I dare you to stand in a redwood grove and not be humbled, or to dive on a coral reef and see even just the glimmer of its former magnificence and have some respect for these ecosystems and the fact that we are sharing this planet."

"I wrote about this intersection between ocean conservation and social justice, because I feel like we don’t talk about that enough."

"this is actually a huge problem with ocean philanthropy, too, is that people want to pay nonprofit groups to do the work to establish protected areas, but not to maintain them, not to enforce them, not to monitor them."

"the ocean has been, for most of human history, very much this open access, shared resource that’s just been plundered by whoever could get there first with the highest-tech equipment, whatever that meant at the time. And that hasn’t gone that well. And so this idea that we could make a plan, a marine spatial plan, an ocean zoning map for deciding what should happen where, and when, and how to reduce the conflicts between different uses, where things can harmoniously coexist; how to make sure we’re not putting shipping lanes where whales are trying to migrate; and we’re thinking about where offshore wind energy should be sited and where regenerative ocean farming should happen and where fishing should happen — all these things need a place. And it’s much more helpful for industry if they have some certainty about the regulatory framework within which they’re trying to develop their business plans."

"being the daughter of a Jamaican and thinking about people all around the world in coastal communities, who depend on the ocean for their food security, for their livelihoods, for their cultures, that if we lose the health of ocean ecosystems, we lose something much, much greater than the way it’s often framed in conservation, as an issue of biodiversity, more technically. And it’s really just — for me, it’s like, as much as I love fish and octopuses and kelp and all these things, it’s really about people, why I do this work."

"Sylvia Earle, what a pioneer...her generation — they were explorers...They’re like, what is even down there? How do we understand this? And then: Oh [bleep], this is in trouble. And they all became conservationists, right? We saw that same professional transformation with Jacques Cousteau."

"I think when the thing that you love is threatened, the natural reaction is to try to save it. And I fell in love with Caribbean coral reefs right as they were starting to crumble."

"there was this moment on a glass-bottom boat (when I was five). And to see a coral reef for the first time, and to see all of these magnificently colored fish swimming around, and to see this literal window into this other world — I was just in awe. And it’s this, like, whole city that’s happening down there, right? It’s not just these little sections where all the fish are the same. It’s this super vibrant and dynamic alternate universe — this ecosystem."

"We are one of 8 million or so species on this planet."