Professor Billy Friebele of Loyola University heats Nestor up for a campus climate change symposium on March 13 with acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh and a keynote on “The Great Uprooting: Migration and Movement in the Age of Climate Change.”
Nestor Aparicio discusses the Maryland Crab Cake Tour and upcoming events, including a climate change symposium at Loyola University on March 13. Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh will speak on climate change and its impact. Professor Billy Friebele, an associate professor of Visual Arts, explains the symposium’s structure, where students from various disciplines discuss a book and prepare for Ghosh’s keynote. Friebele highlights local environmental issues, such as toxic pollution in Curtis Bay and the importance of addressing climate change through community engagement. The event is free and open to the public.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Climate change, Loyola University, Amitav Ghosh, symposium, visual arts, environmental impact, community engagement, interdisciplinary discussion, waterways, toxic tour, climate migration, local events, educational outreach, Baltimore, humanities.
SPEAKERS
Billy Friebele, Nestor Aparicio, Speaker 1
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T. Am 1570 tassel, Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. We’re going to be doing the Maryland crab cake Tour presented by our friends at the Maryland lottery. I’m going to have the magic eight ball to give away. We’re going to be at Faith Lee’s this week on Thursday. But have no fear, we’re going to be at the pizza Johns and Essex on the 21st we’re going to be back at fates on the second of April, putting together a whole bunch of aggressive shows into April and May, including Cocos on April the 30th. We’re doing like an Orio thing that night. We’re going to be Cooper’s on april 21 we’re doing like an Oriole thing that night. So it’s going to be a good time. Come on out, support us and support all the cool things we’re doing here at Baltimore, positive including getting off the sports track, not off the political track, probably right onto the political track, but in a sort of a different kind of way. There’s an event going on here in the city where we can learn things. I love learning things the Center for the Humanities over at Loyola University, where I’ve watched many a basketball game at reach and I actually lectured once they let me lecture like a real professor. It was about journalism. Imagine that on the 13th they’re going to be doing something on climate change and climate the emergency of climate change. And I saw trees blowing around last weekend and the wind, and we’ve had a tough winter and all of that. But just how much the Earth has changed. And I have my own stories of going to New Zealand a couple of years ago and talking to local people, literally at the bottom of the bottom of the South Island of the world, as far south as I could go. I’ve been north, but not lately, but I have flown over the North Pole a couple of times. And the world’s changing. And acclaimed and novelist Amitabh Gosh, or gosh, I believe is their product correct pronunciation, is going to be speaking at Loyola University on March 13, and here to talk about that. And I love smart people. I love when I get to say I have a professor on he is an associate professor of Visual Arts and running this humanities event that we’ve helped promote in years past with all sorts of issues of the world and climate change. I don’t know there’s anything more important than this. And short of getting credit, Nunberg here, we’re going to do a night over Loyola next week, and Professor Billy free here from Loyola, where I’ve spent my time on and off campus, even with the Smithereens back in the 1980s having a good time at concerts. I’ve always loved Loyola lacrosse over there, soccer my buddies played, and all that good stuff. So we got a big night on climate change. It’s amazing. These universities still teaching people stuff. Billy, huh, yep,
Billy Friebele 02:27
yep. We’re still at it, still at it, despite whatever’s going on. Yeah. It’s exciting. I think we have a really great event coming up. And you know, it’s perfect, right after spring break for us. Everybody comes back, and then we dig into what we do for this event is we have students read the same book, and then we get together for two consecutive days, and classes meet from different areas across campus. We all discuss the book together. Different professors lead discussions. So you might have like a marketing professor talking with an theology professor talking with an engineering professor about their perspective. Their perspectives on climate change, and then that all leads up to the keynote on the 13th. Wow.
Nestor Aparicio 03:08
Just like you guys think this through, there’s like a whole syllabus for that. I love using college terms because, you know, I mean, I went to college and I succeeded. I haven’t shown it to anyone in 35 years. But I mean, my college has been honestly, having people like you on. I’m always thrilled to have people that are smarter than me about all sorts of things. We can talk visual arts and all that. But this particular symposium, in recent years, I’ve done all sorts of issues, and I didn’t even realize because sometimes I actually have the keynote speaker on, and they’re not like talking as much about what’s going on on the campus side of things. I do find it interesting when I meet young people about how they perceive the world, see the world in the era of trumplandia, and just what you’re trying to teach in a Jesuit university, and about how we treat people, we treat the world, we treat each other. Boy, climate change, I’d have to sit here for a little bit and think about, you know, war and peace and truth and some pretty foundational things, especially what’s going on with NATO right now and talking politics, but, man, I don’t know there’s anything other than water and air and, you know, sort of life itself and the planet staying in in alignment that’s more important than climate change. And what we’ve, we’ve done with the industrialization of the planet in the last 150 years,
Speaker 1 04:21
for sure. And you know, I think when you talk, you know, when you say those things, it does kind of freeze your mind a little bit, because you just feel so overwhelmed by oh my gosh, like the whole world is affected, and you have these visions of the apocalypse. And I think one of the great things about Amitav Ghosh book is that he does present the facts. But unlike a lot of climate change books where you’re just getting berated with facts and figures, he’s really kind of breaking it down and talking about, how does each discipline look at climate change, and what role do we each have to play? So he’s writing from the perspective of a novelist, and, you know, a fiction writer, he does these really like historically accurate. Fictional books. And so he’s sort of asking the question, why do novels struggle so hard to deal with climate change? And I mean, there’s so much to this book. It’s called The Great derangement, climate change and the unthinkable. And three sections, right? He’s got a section on stories, it’s a section on politics and a section on history. And so that really invites this. Interdisciplinary conversation. That’s why we really thought this would be a good book for us, because we wanted all these different perspectives. But at the end of the day, you know, I mean, I think the sort of thesis some there are many thesis in the book, but one of them is this idea that we have to start thinking about ourselves as a community, unless, like a group of individuals just trying to consume as much as possible, right?
Nestor Aparicio 05:44
So well as America, we have to decide which direction we’re going to I mean, you know, Europe over the last 5060, years. I mean, dude, I’m 56 I know I look young and sexy, but I’m 56 I remember when we were going to be on the metric system by 1976 oh, man, you know what I mean. Like, I remember being in school, in kindergarten, and we were like, we’re going to be metric by 1976 it’s 2025 and we’re not even like we don’t think like that. You know, we never know. We’re never going to think like that. And in Canada, I’m going to be opening day up in Toronto, and I’m going to be living in kilometers, and I’m going to be drinking my beer and liters, which I like better anyway, than some some degree. Yeah, but I would just say, you know, that’s just a very simple, little stupid thing I could talk about, where we’re not going to adopt things that come from other places or thoughts, the climate change thing, it just hit me. My wife and I went to the South Island of New Zealand in 2017 and I’m not really a rugged guy, you know, my wife’s much more hikey and, you know, like all that up in mountains, I’m much more, like, put me on the boat, give me the little tour, and we spent the extra 150 bucks or whatever for one day to go. You can Google this place. It’s called doubtful sound, doubtful. That’s like the word doubtful, um, there’s a place called Milford Sound that’s more touristy and a little more this is a little more rugged, so, like, it’s the literal bottom of the world, below Queenstown. And so we’re at the most extreme place, where the next thing you can swim off Tuesday, Antarctica, like, literally that. And we were there in, it was in February, late February, about this time of year, summer time there. And so it’s the, you know, the warm season. And we took, we had to went through three seasons that we went up a hill, over a mountain that snowed and it was warm and it we saw dolphins, whales, you know, just all these incredible things, penguins, things you can only see at the bottom of the world. But the thing I take from that and that experience, along with the pictures of my wife and I and having a good time and seeing Springsteen and eating a fur burger in Queenstown, which I highly recommend. Like Queens may be the most beautiful. The most beautiful place on earth you can get there between the earthquakes. But we, we were out on the boat, and there was a man there, Polynesian, because it’s very it’s part of the culture there. And he’s an old wise man, and he was running the boat. He was, you know, there was a big boat, but he was one of the boat men that was there. And I sort of befriended because he was local. I had a kiwi accent, and I was talking to him, and befriended him over the course of the day, 434, hours in, and he’s like, Hey, mate, we got out here. I’m going to show you something, you know, learn something American, American. And this is Trump. Was running the country the first time, and he said, you see that? See that peak up there. My whole life I’ve lived down here, and could never see the top of that without snow. Now there’s no snow ever, ever. I lived here 50 years, and I’m like, Ooh, I Google where I was, and I’m like, ooh, that’s that’s serious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to go and see it and feel it in that way. You can see the icebergs breaking up and makes the news. And it’s been so politicized in this country,
Speaker 1 08:50
yeah, 100% it’s interesting. You see, my wife’s actually from Indonesia, and so we go there a lot, you know, other side, not too far from New Zealand, and, yeah, you know, they’re in the process of moving the entire capital because of climate change. Jakarta, right? Is like, such water, right? Literally, right, yeah. And, I mean, the flooding there is unbelievable. You know, her family lives on the coast in Java, and the floods that they get are just unreal, unreal. And, well,
Nestor Aparicio 09:18
they built a place that’s no longer tenable because of what we’ve done to the planet. And that’s that that’s been very clear here from New Orleans on. It should have been clear in 2006 year, right? That should have been the moment, right?
Speaker 1 09:30
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s you hit on a key part of the book where he discusses, like, read
Nestor Aparicio 09:34
the book, right there. I don’t read new books. I don’t read new books, you know, yeah.
Speaker 1 09:43
Now, yeah, he talks about Mumbai and, you know, the way that society just loves to build on the water, and these massive, you know, metropolises that spring up right on the water and that real estate prices become, you know, even more when you’re right next to it. But that’s all going to be an issue as we go forward. So, yeah, that’s, that’s a key, key problem, right? Billy
Nestor Aparicio 10:04
freebel is here. He is a professor of visual what is a professor of visual arts that I can’t even say?
Speaker 1 10:09
Oh, I teach studio art. So we do sculpture, we do, you know, digital art. In my department, we do drawing, painting, printmaking. Those are areas that I’m not as well versed in but yeah, yeah, we have a lot of fun, and we make stuff with our hands. And, yeah, well,
Nestor Aparicio 10:26
you know, I got a liberal arts education, and I have my BS in corporate community. Love Sam. I have a BS. It’s great. I went to University of Baltimore, but, you know, it’s 35 years ago, and you know, I think about the things that kids want and learn and need to know today, I would just honestly say, like, see liberal arts. I’d be like, what’s a visual artsy, fartsy dude like you doing running climate change. I mean, I think that’s the whole point of going to college, is learning about a lot of different things, right? And being a professor of one thing would not certainly preclude you from having a wife from that part of the world that understands climate change because it’s growing up her life and her family’s life, right? Right?
Speaker 1 11:06
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I honestly, like I was excited to take this book on, because my artwork is about is about climate change. It’s about rivers. I did a whole project with blue water Baltimore last year with we did an animation class that worked with blue water Baltimore to help them visualize some of the big issues with the waterways in Baltimore. So, I mean, so I’m excited about this book. I think, you know, it fits really well with all the things I’m trying to do in terms of working local. I mean, the big thing about climate change is, as I said, it’s a massive issue that really freezes your brain. So what do you do? Well, you try to work locally, right? So one of the things we’re doing around this, this symposium, is we are creating localized, Baltimore based events. So for example, two Fridays ago, we took a group to Curtis Bay, and we did a toxic tour of Curtis Bay, led by Well, Nicole fabricant, who’s at Towson as an anthropology organized the tour, but we were meeting with residents, high school students, who have an organization called free your voice, that had been fighting against all of the toxic pollution down there. We got to see, like a coal transfer peer, that CSX allows coal to blow right off of the piles of coal into the communities. There’s, like, really high rates of asthma. We got to see,
Nestor Aparicio 12:24
I grew up in Dundalk, dude. So, okay, I’ve worked at Sparrows Point and died of asbestos. So, you know, dredging all of that keep it, keeping the nuclear plant out of there, getting, you know, like I’ve been doing this. That’s why I stopped talking about sports exclusively, because there’s too many important things going on. And when I think about climate change just here with we have more. And I never knew this till I got old, like literally, we have more waterway than any other state in the country because of the tributaries we have here. And this crazy ass crab cake tour I’ve been doing that people think he’s eating a lot of crab cakes. I’ve just covered the whole state and summers and seeing how beautiful this state is, how many people fish, and how important the waterways are, and the crabbers on the eastern shore, and the ladies they bring in from Latin America that can, that can, that can make crabs meat happen. So we can keep crab meat down and get the bay right. And the oysters have to be right in the bay to oxygenate the bay, to get the the and the water temperature needs to be ideal, which is a real problem as it warms up, because the crabs cost more over. Cost this because we can’t pull them out of the bay. We’re over crap in the bay. And like I’ve, Martin O’Malley’s written a book on this so, and now he’s running Social Security, trying to save that for us. So we’ve, I’ve been at this a while on all of these things, but I’ll say two things. Middle River, the flood of 2003 moved me downtown. My basement flooded in White Marsh. I just thought, for each storm, you know what I mean, it’s just a hurricane. And then my dear friend and I was wearing my state fair shirt. I just took it off because I wore it all day yesterday in Catonsville, my friend Evan Brown, who’s from Catonsville, had a beautiful restaurant called port tallies in Old Town, Ellicott City. It flooded once in a once a century, or once a lifetime, or and then a year and a half later, he rebuilt. It flooded again. He took a friendlies on Frederick Road in Catonsville, where it’s flat, and has built a beautiful four restaurants the basement El Guapo Beaumont. They sponsor us state fair. But those floods in Ellicott City and the flood we all endured in bully’s quarters and the places that flood every time there’s a flood, go over to Mount Washington, where the Whole Foods is it’s underwater. Smith Avenue, like all these places that flood every time there’s a flood, every time there’s a rainstorm, this isn’t getting fixed. Man, you know, the thing it seems to get fixed is our behavior, our behavior and our politics, yeah, and
Speaker 1 14:54
the more you know, the more concrete and Imperial impervious services we create. Right, that water just turns into a shoot and it just goes down in those neighborhoods, like we have some some flooding. Where I live, I’m closer down to DC, but I started looking around and realized that, like, there’s also, like a racial component to this, right, like the lands that flood the most in DC, at least, were the lands that were sort of designated for freed slaves. So they said, you know, you can have this land, but that’s the land that’s always going to get the worst of the of the flooding, right? So we brought, we also brought in this artist named Stacy Levy, who deals specifically with water flooding and pathways of water. She’s like, she’s this amazing public artist, and she builds sculptures and public artworks that also serve as, like environmental improvement, sort of engineering aspects. So she actually met with our engineering department, and so she’s doing a project on campus the week after the symposium, where she’s going to she’s going to plant like a spiral of native plants that circle a storm drain, right? So that’s where all the water pours down into. And she’s trying to create both like a pathway that you could walk, you know, in a spiral, and kind of have a moment of peace, but also to accentuate this, like the spiraling of the drain, the water pouring down that drain. And, you know, to get us to think about because there, there is stony run that runs right through campus, right and so nobody really thinks about it that, you know, all the water, whatever you throw on the ground, is going right to Stony run. It’s going, you know, out into the bay from there. So, yeah, it’s all interconnected. And we’re trying to, we’re trying to do these kind of activities, to have a, you know, local aspect of climate change, really think about what’s happening right outside our doors. Well, you know
Nestor Aparicio 16:45
what? My friends at Liberty, pure solutions, one another one of my sponsors, keeps my water clean, and I’ve talked to him a lot about in the county and well water and runoff from all sorts of whatever toxins I was out fishing with Dan Rodricks, my pal, taking me fly fishing for the first time my life, out in the western part of the state, where this paper mill was blowing bad stuff down the river and killing all the rainbow trout, killing the fish. And, you know, I’ve thought, what’s what’s in the water, like, literally, and I’ve asked Liberty pure, you know, and I have a water filtration system in my home, because what we’re drinking is what’s making up our life. And I can’t my wife’s a two time leukemia survivor. She was a 911 first responder, and she went down there in September 13 and breathed in the air and had to fight for her life twice at Hopkins a dozen years ago. So these environmental issues that we don’t know about don’t feel lead paint in the city, just stuff that asbestos that we you know, we talk about the Willy Wonka suits coming in and what’s going on in the city for a long, long time on the racial divide of that. But water, water is so fundamental, and the climate change and how it affects water is also baked into this. Hey, this sounds like a great night. Tell everybody what they can expect when I want to get the pronunciation right. Okay, acclaimed novelist amatov Ghosh speaking at Loyola University on March 13. My guest is Professor Billy freebel. He is the Associate Professor of visual arts. But they do this humanity series, this book, all this stuff, and they bring in big shot speaker to come in and teach these kids something, and that’s what you’re trying to do. But it isn’t it’s a night where your campus unites,
Speaker 1 18:34
correct, yeah, for sure. And it’s also, we love how the community also shows up for these events. So we invite anyone. It’s a free event. You can find the information on our website. And it’s at 630 he’s going to give a lecture on climate migration, which is interesting that you just mentioned that you had to move because of floods, right? This is something we’re going to see a lot more of. And yeah, he actually talked to a lot of climate migrants in Venice and different areas around the world and collected stories. And he’s going to be doing a bit of storytelling and kind of interweaving that personal narrative with a more like what we’re doing, talking more globally.
Nestor Aparicio 19:13
Well, I’m going to send him down to Queenstown because he’s going to get hell with cheeseburger and a good ride on the thing. I’m going to send him to find my keenly friend and have him tell some stories about, you know, what it looks like down there, because it’s not inhospitable in the way that the northern parts of Sweden or Norway or Alaska, you know, where you may talk to Inuit people, you know, in that part of the world, this is like, not an inhabited by a lot more lambs and sheep lords of The Lord, whatever that thing is, the you know, Tolkien, whatever, I don’t read any of that. You know, I already told you, I don’t read, I read books. I’m kidding you. I always say that, and I’ll end this with you. But the event is March 13, and it’s free, right? Everybody can come after this, right? Yeah. And website, where can people find all this information on that?
Speaker 1 19:58
It’s at Loyola. Dot edu, Humanities symposium,
Nestor Aparicio 20:05
just symposium, yeah, just,
Speaker 1 20:08
just go on the website and look up humanity symposium. It’s easy to find. It’s
Nestor Aparicio 20:12
March 13, and the campus is centrally located. You know, in the middle of all that, I forgot the last what stories I was gonna tell you a story. I forgot my story. I’m long winded about it. The most important thing is, I’ve been going to Loyola all my life. I never went to school there, but I did get to give one lecture on journalism there, and I appreciate it. And I’ll say this about your campus, because I’ve tried to say polite things about everybody when I come on their campuses, because I’m I feel like I’m Thornton Mellon. You know what I mean? Like, I’m too old to go back to college, but when I come on your campus is beautiful, man. And I never, I never knew how beautiful it was till I walked into some buildings and I’m like, oh, man, I want to go to Loyola. I never knew that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 20:53
I mean, I will say it’s also an arboretum, so there’s these really old trees throughout, and you’ll see, like, little tree tags that identifying the trees, so that gives it this really nice kind of woodsy feel to it. So well,
Nestor Aparicio 21:06
I like Loyola, and I appreciate the I love having a guest like you on every year. Bring me some more anthropologists and visual arts people and people doing good stuff here in Baltimore, people measuring the water and making sure the water is clean for us. It’s important.
Speaker 1 21:19
100% Yeah, I agree, yeah, we and you got to just act locally. That’s the only thing you can do. Right? You know
Nestor Aparicio 21:25
what? This was a story I was going to tell you, because it was about the joke of not reading books. I’m an author. I’m a writer. I cut my teeth writing at the newspaper back in the 80s. I’m I’m a right when I die, my thing won’t say radio idiot. It’ll just say writer, uh, probably be spelled wrong, but I like that right or wrong. So as a writer, I wrote a book on the Ravens when they won the Super Bowl here, I don’t know if you were here or not, 2013 through 2014 they won the Super Bowl, and I write this book on it, big, thick book. Nope, no pictures. Didn’t have no pictures in it. It was a third person story of Joe Flacco and how they won. And I took the book down to Ocean City for a fan experience. They have a summer fan experience. June, it’s Father’s Day. Week. I had 10,000 books, and there were 15,000 Raven fans, and everybody’s all hooted up, drunk up. And I had the books, and every person that walked by looked at the book, and it had too many words, and they all said the same thing to me, I don’t read new books, that books. So I dealt with that for two days in Ocean City, and I felt like the world was going to hell. And then Trump got elected the first time. So so like it’s more, it’s more of a punch line for me to say, I don’t read no books, because it was spoken to me that way, because there’s nothing more important than people becoming more educated, especially about something as important as climate change. So I appreciate the good work you guys are doing over there. I
Speaker 1 22:47
appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, reading is down. But you know, there’s lots of other formats, right? You can listen to books. You could. There’s a videos I’ve been trying to I’ve been sending out. Also check out his, his on that note, if you don’t have time to read his book, just there’s a bunch of interviews with him, and he’s amazing in the interviews. So just look those up.
Nestor Aparicio 23:05
I love compelling people who are trying to teach us stuff, and I try to learn as much as I can. So time well spent with you, Professor. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Nestor, yeah, I did a half an hour with a visual arts guy. We never even got to the visual arts part of this. Bring you back on the show.
Speaker 1 23:19
That’s all right, yeah, we’ll do that. The event is on the
Nestor Aparicio 23:23
13th hopefully everybody gets over to Loyola University. It’s very, very important to claim novelist Amitav Ghosh speaking at Loyola on the threat of climate emergency on the back end of his book, The Great uprooting migration and movement in the age of climate change. It is keynote speech, and it’s free and it’s easy. And if you enjoy such things and such topics and and you’re like learning stuff, you can go over there on the 13th. I am Nestor. We are wnst am 1570 Towson, Baltimore, and we never stop talking Baltimore, positive. You.
