Dungeons, Dragons, and Dreaming Climate Futures with Lil Milagro Henriquez

Written By Marina Psaros

Summary

What if the answer to climate anxiety isn't more data, but more play? Lil Milagro Henriquez is the founder and executive director of Mycelium Youth Network, where she's helping young people build climate resilience through radical imagination. What I’m taking away from this episode:

  • Dreaming isn't frivolous. In this moment of collective failure of imagination, making space to "dream huge" isn't a luxury. It's the necessary first step in building futures that we’ll actually want to inhabit.

  • Education should prepare young people for the world they'll actually inhabit in the future, not the one from the past. Our current system operates on the erroneous assumption that the world will be roughly the same in 20 - 30 years. What if instead of teaching backward-looking skills and knowledge, we instead create space for young people to explore the hundreds of real solutions and careers of the future? Lil and I mostly discussed this in a climate change context, but it also holds true in an AI context.

  • Go ahead, let young people create their own solutions. 🤯 As Lil quips in the interview, it's "surprisingly radical" to assert that if young young people have the opportunity to express a concern and create a solution, they will. So ... maybe we adults should ask ourselves why we think this is radical? Or better yet, we adults could create more opportunities for youth to speak and solve. 

Resources and interesting stuff related to this episode

  • Mycelium Youth Network: Oakland-based nonprofit using gaming and traditional ecological knowledge for climate resilience education.

  • Gaming for Justice: Mycelium Youth Network’s original immersive experience that is designed, drawn, and soundtracked by SF Bay area artists. Using a combination of oral storytelling, visuals, and music, the game explores the history (and future!) of the San Francisco Bay Area with a specific focus on Oakland, California. 

  • The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline: The Indigenous futurism novel Lil references about people who retain the ability to dream in a world where most have lost it. 

  • 2017 California Wildfires: More than 10,000 structures were destroyed across the state, and more than 9,000 fires burned a total of 1,248,606 acres.

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Marina Psaros
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