Favianna Rodriguez Quotes

We actually need to make it cool to be a part of Earth Day.

Where is the pop culture that makes riding public transportation and eating a plant-based diet fun, cool, and accessible to diverse audiences? Imagine the power of being exposed to an abundance of stories, songs, and images that challenge our fundamental consumption culture and expand our perspectives by helping us feel the consequences of our choices. What if we made it uncool to use fossil fuels in the same way smoking became uncool?

When it comes to climate change, most of the stories and cultural content that exist to inform and organize people are overwhelmingly pain oriented, outdated, and hella White.

Our current relationship to the Earth is based on a worldview of domination that supports an extractive economy.

As the old narrative of capitalism reveals its devastating failures, we urgently need more compelling and relatable stories that show us what a just, sustainable, and healthy world can look like.

Culture is power. The music we listen to, the social media we consume, the food we eat, the movies and television shows we watch-these all inform our values, behaviors, and worldviews. Culture is in a constant battle for our imagination. It is our most powerful tool to inspire the social change these times demand.

Art is uniquely able to speak to our understanding of the world by delivering potent, powerful and empathetic content. People engage with art in a very different way than they engage with a policy paper or a news article or even a protest. This is why I believe in the power of art to shape thoughts, change hearts, and ultimately help shape laws and policy. Art has the potential to distill the most complex social challenges down to their most basic and simplest values. Values like love, family, caring for the other, caring for those in need, and fighting the things that cause human suffering.

The anti-immigrant movement has successfully been able to dominate the immigration debate by pushing out messages about migrants that are inhumane, racist, xenophobic and hateful. But those of us who fight for migrant rights are not only fighting back, we want to reframe the way migrants are viewed, artists especially. We want to expose the tragic losses that have resulted from unjust immigration laws, and we want to inspire and challenge people to reimagine migration as something beautiful and natural — somethign [sic] we all do.

I think that people often think that culture is neutral, but culture is a major battleground. People have to understand that the culture they're seeing is reflective of a power structure that is impeding our progress as a society…

I think that all art is political. I think that art is always an expression of a human experience, and I very much believe that the arts are central to our society…