Sustain What? (Andy @Revkin)

Original Air Date: October 27, 2021

Drawing on insights from his book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal, our featured guest, Professor Noam Chomsky, will explore paths to climate progress on an overheating and starkly unequal planet with fresh assessments from Columbia Climate School's Jeff Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and Dr. Belinda Archibong, a Barnard College economist focused on African development and perspectives on climate and energy policy. The session will be hosted by longtime climate journalist Andy Revkin, the founding director of the Initiative on Communication & Sustainability of the Columbia Climate School. Student nominated representatives from Teachers College will have an opportunity to engage the panel with their questions on climate action and learning.



Links to bios and more information are here:

https://j.mp/chomskyclimate



This special Sustain What segment is organized by the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School and the Teachers College Program in Adult Learning and Leadership.



It is hosted by Andy Revkin, founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia Climate School.

What decisions can we make today as individuals and societies to create a better tomorrow?

Join Columbia Climate School's Andrew Revkin, economist Kate Raworth, and philosopher Roman Krznaric for a conversation on how reinventing economics and incorporating long-term thinking into our current policies can help us meet the challenges of climate breakdown and global inequality, and transform our world for future generations.

Speakers:

Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His latest book is The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World. His previous international bestsellers, including Empathy, The Wonderbox and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages.

Kate Raworth is a renegade economist focused on making economics fit for 21st-century realities. She is the creator of the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries, and co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab. Her internationally best-selling book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist has been translated into over 20 languages and has been widely influential with diverse audiences, from the UN General Assembly to Pope Francis to Extinction Rebellion.

Andrew Revkin has written on climate change and other environmental challenges for nearly 40 years, mostly for The New York Times and now at revkin.bulletin.com. He founded the Columbia Climate School's Initiative on Communication and Sustainability in 2019 and runs a popular webcast series, Sustain What, clarifying paths to progress on urgent challenges where complexity and consequence collide. He has won most of the top awards in science journalism as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.

This conversation is part of the Entre Nous series organized in partnership with the The American Library in Paris and Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

This conversation was held as a Zoom video conference on Mon, September 20, 2021 | 1:30 pm (New York) | 7:30 pm (Paris) | 6:30 pm (London)

In my 400-plus Sustain What conversations, several stand out, includng this intergenerational discussion of economic models that can fit on a finite planet. I invited Herman E. Daly, a founding force behind “steady-state economics,” to examine possible paths to less fragile global systems with Kate Raworth, whose “doughnut economics” model aims to build economic policies and metrics that put thriving ahead of growing.

Aired: June 2, 2021

A special Sustain What episode with two scientists, a journalist and a songwriter offering ways to navigate turbulence, polarization and disinformation with the fewest regrets.



Join Andy Revkin of Columbia’s Climate School with Carnegie Mellon philosopher Andy Norman; solution-focused journalist Amanda Ripley; Columbia University psychologist and conflict dissector Peter Coleman, and songwriter and storyteller Reggie Harris.



Send feedback and ideas for future shows:

http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback



Here's more on our guests:



- Peter T. Coleman, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, will discuss lessons from his new book, “The Way Out - How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.”



Coleman holds a joint appointment at Teachers College and the Earth Institute and directs two research centers. He is also the author of “Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement” (2014) and “The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts” (2011), among other books.



He says “The Way Out” is “about why we are stuck in our current cultural riptide and what we can do to find our way out. It will explain how patterns of intractable polarization can and do change, and offer a set of principles and practices for navigating and healing the more difficult divides in your home, workplace and community.”



Learn more: https://thewayoutofpolarization.com/



- Reggie Harris is a longtime folk singer and songwriter, storyteller and educator who has worked and sung for racial understanding, human rights and justice for decades. He’ll speak about his experiences at the interface of love and hate, Black and White and maybe sing a song or two.



He describes his new album, “On Solid Ground,” as a “call for personal and national grounding in the explosion of racial and civil unrest and the growing worldwide death spiral that was 2020.”



Explore Harris’s music, writing and activities: https://reggieharrismusic.com/



- Andy Norman teaches philosophy and directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. He says his focus is studying how ideologies short-circuit minds and corrupt moral understanding and developing tools that help people reason together in more fruitful ways.



Norman will describe insights offered in his new book, “Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."



Learn more: https://andynorman.org/



- Amanda Ripley is a solutions-focused journalist and bestselling author who has become a champion of a new style of journalism sifting less for sound bites and more for pathways to insight amid complexity.



Her new book is “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.”



Here’s Ripley’s summary of this concept: “When we are baffled by the insanity of the ‘other side’—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. That’s what ‘high conflict’ does. People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.”



Explore: https://amandaripley.com/high-conflict



Sustain What, produced and hosted by Andy Revkin, is a series of conversations seeking progress where complexity and consequence collide.

A pandemic and attendant economic crisis rock the world along with political and social turmoil intensified by an overheating information environment and overheating climate. What's a solution-oriented human being to do?



Slow down and stretch your time scales, according to three experienced analysts of this extraordinary moment in human history.



Join the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin, the philosopher Roman Krznaric, the journalist and resilience expert Bina Venkataraman and the filmmaker John D. Sutter in a discussion of ways to find meaning by stepping back from the urgency of now.



Krznaric's new book is "The Good Ancestor - How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World."



Learn more about him and the book here:

https://www.romankrznaric.com/good-ancestor



Bina Venkataraman is the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. She previously taught in MIT’s program on science, technology and society, directed policy initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT and served as senior advisor for climate change innovation in the Obama White House.



She is the author of "The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age," named one of Amazon’s best books on business and leadership of 2019.



Learn more here: http://writerbina.com/



John D. Sutter, formerly a climate-focused CNN video journalist, has embarked on an epic “slow journalism” project, a film looking at climate change by visiting four dispersed communities every five years through 2050. He is working on the first installment, “Baseline: part 1." The name draws on the “shifting baselines” concept that each generation can miss momentous environmental change unfolding over long time scales.



https://www.baselinefilm.com/

Original Air Date: November 11, 2020

DESCRIPTION: Too often, politicians and the rest of us choose to wait for clarity before tackling tough, consequential, challenges. News media cover disastrous events far better than underlying drivers of risk - or resilience.



To seek solutions, join Andy Revkin’s Earth Institute Sustain What brainstorm with participants in this year’s annual conference of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty – a community focused on making the most out of inconveniently murky reality.



We’ll examine how to assess and communicate effective policies and practices in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, today’s turbulent political landscape, development economics and climate change.



The discussion features David G. Groves of the Rand Corporation; Alejandro Poiré, dean of the School of Government and Public Transformation at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City and a former secretary of governance in the administration of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón; Julie Rozenberg, an economist with the World Bank Sustainable Development Group.



As always your host is Andy Revkin, a journalist with 35 years on the climate and calamity beat who now heads the Earth Institute Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University.



Learn more about the Initiative here: http://sustcomm.ei.columbia.edu



Send show feedback and ideas: http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback



Learn more about the 2020 meeting of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty: http://deepuncertainty.org



Follow our guests



David G. Groves: https://www.rand.org/about/people/g/groves_david_g.html

Alejandro Poiré: https://twitter.com/AlejandroPoire

Julia Rozenberg: https://twitter.com/julierozenberg

Air Date: August 6, 2021

DESCRIPTION: In this special live Sustain What webcast, join host Andy Revkin of the Columbia Climate School and http://revkin.bulletin.com in a brisk solution-focused discussion with top experts of pathways to risk reduction in the world’s hundreds of crowding deluge danger zones.



Humans are profoundly heating the climate and changing storm patterns through a surge in emissions of heat-trapping gases and other pollution. But there’s also been a simultaneous surge of settlement in zones prone to flooding -- producing what some geographers call an “expanding bull’s eye” of exposure to climate-related threats like floods. And of course the poorest and most marginalized populations are always hurt most.



A pioneering study, published in Nature on Wednesday, has greatly raised estimates of population growth in flood-affected regions and offers sobering projections of much more flood exposure through 2030 without big changes in policy at every scale. Luckily the work, sifting millions of high-resolution satellite images, has also produced a new open-access tool, the Global Flood Database (http://global-flood-database.cloudtostreet.ai), that offers officials at all levels, the financial world and communities a clearer view of the exposure they’ve created and a chance to shape safer development paths in the critical years ahead.



Read Andy Revkin's story about the paper: http://j.mp/bulletinflood



GUESTS:



Beth Tellman, Cloud to Street Chief Science Officer and lead author of the Nature paper



Jean-Martin Bauer, Senior Digital Advisor for the UN World Food Programme and former WFP Country Director of Republic of the Congo



Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development



Simon Young, senior director for climate and resilience at the global advisory company Willis Towers Watson (he has been building new types of insurance to respond to floods and other extreme events around the world including Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands)

In this webcast, former senior intelligence and national security officers explore headlines noting that intelligence reports provided to the Trump White House had laid out the likelihood of a pandemic with unnerving clarity - and one even noted worrisome signs of a rapidly spreading virus in Wuhan in November (ABC: https://bit.ly/covid19wuhanintell)



But the challenge for this or any administration is not awareness as much as prioritization, as former National Intelligence Council analyst Rod Schoonover put it in a previous Sustain What conversation:



“In my world in the intelligence community, I was often very proud to be in one of the only parts of the government that either had the platform or the freedom to clearly state some of the risks. In the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, it lays out language that’s very, very, eerily prescient of this moment. But it also landed on, I think, page 21. So, yes, it’s a risk, but we clearly don’t have it calibrated quite right.”



http://j.mp/coronaschoonover



In a fresh chat with Schoonover and Alice Hill - a former National Security Council official and biodefense expert now at the Council on Foreign Relations - we explore what will be needed for an administration with any political orientation to do better.

Air Date: December 23, 2020

Earlier this year, the famed climate-focused novelist Kim Stanley Robinson told Columbia students: “I’ve been pushing myself to write utopian narratives; that gets weirder as we continue on the course that we’re on."



In this special intergenerational Sustain What conversation, Robinson returns to Columbia (virtually this time) to explore the themes in his sweltering, jarring new novel “Ministry for the Future” with the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin and several advocates for the future – including the 15-year-old climate change campaigner Alexandria Villaseñor and Carolyn Raffensperger, a lawyer who was an early leader of calls for "a legal guardian for the future."



Information on the book is here: http://j.mp/2WnLeXy



Unlike Robinson's previous novels set after profound climate change have set in over generations or centuries , this one begins a mere 30 years in the future. As Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone recently summarized, "It’s a trip through the carbon-fueled chaos of the coming decades, with engineers working desperately to stop melting glaciers from sliding into the sea, avenging eco-terrorists downing so many airliners that people are afraid to fly, and bankers re-inventing the economy in real time in a desperate attempt to avert extinction."  



Several other students will join to ask questions, final exams and papers allowing. Students and faculty are encouraged to submit questions or comments in advance.



Email revkin+ksr@gmail.com



More on our guests:

Alexandria Villaseñor, who turned 15 last spring, was one of the first, and youngest, American students to build on Greta Thunberg's climate strikes and has gone on to co-found the youth-run group Earth Uprising. https://earthuprising.org/



Carolyn Raffensperger is an environmental lawyer pursuing fundamental changes in law and policy she and other experts see necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment. She is the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network.

http://sehn.org



In 2007, Andrew Revkin interviewed Raffensperger for his New York Times blog in a post asking a question she answers with a resounding yes: "Does the Future Need a Legal Guardian?" https://j.mp/futurelegalguardian



(Try the link a couple of times, like opening an old stuck door.)



More resources:

The Columbia student podcast with Robinson from February: https://j.mp/ksrgreennewdeal.



Read Goodell's captivating interview with Robinson: https://j.mp/rollingstoneKSR



To offer feedback and suggestions for Sustain What, or to find out how to support us, click here: http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback

October 7, 2020

On Fridays, the Sustain What webcast of Columbia University's Earth Institute dives behind headlines and hashtags with leading journalists and experts to offer insights on what's really afoot.



A great panel is coming together to discuss this week's truly extraordinary developments, in which a president infected with the novel virus driving the COVID-19 pandemic checked out of a military hospital tweeting, "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life."

October 2, 2020

Thomas Homer-Dixon, the bestselling author of The Upside of Down and other books exploring pathways through complexity, joins Sustain What host Andy Revkin and two special guests in a bracing discussion of the themes of his latest work: "Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril." (https://commandinghope.com/)



The guests are:



- Susan Cox-Smith, a partner and futurist at Changeist, a consultancy and training organization that curates and creates "experiences that stretch strategic thinking, materialize the new, and connect with people about what comes next." She's a contributing editor of the new book "How to Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange." Learn more at http://changeist.com



- Michael Garfield, a philosopher, musician, painter and writer who blogs for Long Now Foundation and hosts the Future Fossil podcast.



His Long Now posts: https://blog.longnow.org/0author/michaelgarfield/

Future Fossils: https://shows.acast.com/futurefossils/episodes



Homer-DIxon sees three paths to bending humanity's curve away from a long descent after the last century of zooming progress. As he writes"



"At this crucial moment in humanity’s history, I argue, three changes are essential to keep us from descending into intractable, savage violence.



First, we need individually to better understand how and why we see the world the way we do and what makes other people’s views sometimes so different from ours. Second, instead of passively accepting a dystopian image of what will come tomorrow, we need to actively create together from our diverse perspectives a shared story of a positive future — including a shared identity as “we” — that will help us address our common problems and thrive. And, finally, we need to fully mobilize our extraordinary human agency to produce that future."



More on the book and his research and other output:

http://homerdixon.com

I hope you’ll give a listen to this dose of grounded climate and development optimism from three wonderful contributors to the new essay collection and online project called Not Too Late - Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possiblity.

I’m still trying to gauge who among you wants audio podcasts. Please let me know through my feedback form!

My guests are:

* the best-selling author and activist Rebecca Solnit

* the University of Maine paleoecologist and masterful communicator Jacquelyn Gill

* the Clark University climate geographer and IPCC report lead author Edward Carr

* (Thelma Young Lutunatabua, who is book co-editor with Solnit and a digital storyteller and activist, couldn’t join from Fiji because of family duties but I’ll have her on soon!)

I really like seeing the faces in these conversations and if that’s your preference, too, you can watch (and please share!) this Sustain What show on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube…

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For half a century, Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, an extraordinary husband-and-wife science team at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, have been documenting both the decline of mountain glaciers in and around the tropics and the climate history locked in cylinders of ice they’ve extracted from such frozen libraries before they vanish.

Now two filmmakers, Danny O’Malley and Alex Rivest, have produced an enthralling documentary, Canary, that chronicles this couple’s edge-pushing and literally death-defying efforts. O’Malley is best known for his work on the long-running Chef’s Table series on Netflix and Rivest recently moved from neuroscience research into science storytelling. Despite, or maybe because of, those unlikely backgrounds, they’ve produced a deeply human account of two indefatigable human beings whose planetary heroism emerged through a mix of curiosity, serendipity and passionate perspicacity.

September 20th theater screenings

The film has a special one-night screening at more than 140 theaters around the United States on September 20th and I strongly encourage you to go if you can find a screen close by at the Oscilloscope Films website.

Here’s the Canary trailer:

I watched the film in an online press preview and loved every minute, but I’m biased. I’ve known the Thompsons since 1994, when I interviewed Lonnie for a 1995 feature on the global retreat in alpine glaciers I wrote for Conde Nast Traveler. I encourage you to click and give it a read (I reposted it here on Substack with some new artwork).

I continued to cover his work, including in a 2001 front-page New York Times story on the retreat, and inevitable vanishing of the tenuous ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro.

This snippet from Canary, posted with permission, shows Lonnie at work in that bizarre Kilimanjaro ice field back then:

By 2004, I was writing about how that mountain’s meldown was becoming a two-sided icon in the debate over what to do, or not do, facing human-caused global warming.

And please read the extraordinary 2012 profile of Lonnie written by my former Times colleauge Justin Gillis, who began the reporting when he learned that this high-climbing scientist was poised to have a heart transplant: “A Climate Scientist Battles Time and Mortality.”

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My latest Sustain What conversation is a bit off the typical themes I’ve focused on since the early days of the pandemic. Our topic was innovations and lessons surrounding a giant-squid hunt. Watch and you’ll meet Nathan Robinson, a marine biologist and science communicator I got to know at a Global Exploration Summit we both spoke at last summer and his research collaborator and mentor Edie Widder, whose research focus has long been on bioluminescence.

Widder has built a lauded science and conservation career blending neuroscience, technology and keen observational skills. See her three TED talks and visit her Florida conservation organization Team Orca for more.

Robinson became something of a viral sensation some years back when he pulled a plastic straw from the nostril of an olive ridley sea turtle - in an excruciating effort for both reptile and humans. This still image is from Christine Figgener’s video, which has 85 million views on the Leatherback Trust channel on YouTube.

We talk about how they came together - Robinson from sea turtle science and Widder from studying things that glow in the deep - to stalk and film one of the ocean’s great reclusive leviathans - the giant squid (Architeuthis dux).

Now that I’m fully independent, I hope more of you will consider financially supporting my Sustain What project.

Widder had played a core role in the international expedition that in 2012 for the first time filmed a living giant squid in its deep ocean lair. I wrote about that discovery in The Times. Since the 1990’s she’d been refining submersible lighting and camera systems, with names including “Eye in the Sea” and “Medusa,” designed to lure and record deep-sea life without scaring elusive creatures away. Byrd Pinkerton wrote a really nice Vox feature about this quest. Also read Widder’s description of her Medusa system and a glowing lure imitating a jellyfish.

On June 19, 2019, during an expedition in the Gulf of Mexico spearheaded by Widder and Robinson, the Medusa camera system caught a giant squid stealthily emerging from the darkness to examine the glowing lure. Listen to my guests describe this mesmerizing moment.

In our chat, Robinson also describes a recent effort to film an even larger cephalopod - the (yes!) colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni). He did so on one of the giant commercial fishing vessels frequenting Antarctic waters in search of the latest species targeted there, the toothfish. An injury to a crewman and other developments ended that colossal quest.

An Antarctic krill competition

In the webcast we talk about how those remote southern seas are becoming the latest exploitation zone for vessels not only seeking finfish like toothfish but also krill - a harvest that ironically is pitting human fishers against slowly recovering populations of great whales that we nearly wiped out in decades past. We discussed a paper published early in 2023 describing how scientists and tourists on a Lindblad ship in Antarctic waters witnessed a disturbing competition, in essence, between an enormous gathering of fin whales and a fleet of commercial krill ships: “Commercial krill fishing within a foraging supergroup of fin whales in the Southern Ocean.” Here’s a snippet of video posted with the Stanford University news release on that research.

I’m happy to see that Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has made this massive krill quest a new target. I’ll try to do a followup show on that issue.

More

Here’s Nathan Robinson’s Global Exploration Summit talk:

Watch Widder’s trio of TED talks:

I hope you’ll watch or listen to this wonderful Sustain What conversation on ways to navigate, and improve, this moment on Earth increasingly called the Anthropocene - the Earth as shaped by human activities, for worse or better.

Some here will recall I played a role in the evolution of this concept thanks to a line in my 1992 book on global warming. See my essay about that at the bottom of this post.

My guests are the longtime actor and environmmental activist Ed Begley, Jr.; Sam Matey, the writer of the refreshing Substack newsletter The Weekly Anthropocene; and Yvonne Reddick, an environment-focused poet and scholar who is Reader in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire.

Reddick’s new poetry collection is Burning Season, which won the 2023 Laurel Prize for best UK first poetry collection. She has also just written Anthropocene Poetry – Place, Environment and Planet.

Ed Begley’s life has been a whirlwind of acting success, personal challenges and endless enthusiasm for improving lives and life on Earth through activism. He has written a funny, sad and valuable new book on his journey: To the Temple of Tranquility...And Step On It!: A Memoir.

To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I got to know Ed Begley starting in 2005 and first covered his decades of environment-focused communication in a quirky video I did for The New York Times with my former colleague Pat Farrell in 2008. Begley and I conversed in a pedicab on a frigid Manhattan winter day about his “Living with Ed” show on HG TV and much more. It’s worth a look as a fun artifact from my first year of Dot Earth blogging. The video isn’t on YouTube or the like but you can watch it on nytimes.com here:

Sam Matey, who graduated college at 18, when most of us are just starting that part of our life journeys, is an early-career environmental scientist, climate journalist and geospatial data analyst who is devoted to balancing all the dire headlines you’re flooded with with big regular doses of environmental and social progress. Join me in subscribing to The Weekly Anthropocene.

Here’s his 2023 Year in Review post:

Here’s my Anthropocene journey:

Watch Yvonne Reddick’s short fillm on Britain’s snow hares:

And here’s an amazing vista we were graced with here on our shoreline in Downeast Maine last week - when a cold snap built mist over the warmer seawater and cloaked the salt marsh with hoarfrost. For more clips, including the scene after a thaw, click over to @revkin on X.

Please share this post - more than you might share others.

INSERT - Join me with a batch of wonderful guests in a special pop-up live musical gathering Monday, January 1, New Year’s Day, at noon US Eastern time! Join on YouTube here:

Also streaming on Facebook, LinkedIn and X/Twitter (no advance link in X; just join us at @revkin at showtime).

~ ~

Another year down, full of extreme heat and turmoil, success and peril - both climatic and societal. And the year ahead could make this year seem boring.

I could do a “top 10” list of insights or events in 2023 or predictions for 2024, but won’t. Instead I’ll offer the song abov, which I began writing during the last great recession but that feels like a good fit on lots of days in this unfolding century. In it I suggest we all “start each day with a prayer and end each day with a toast.” You can listen or download an mp3 on Bandcamp here. The lyrics are at the bottom of this post.

For blow-by-blow posting, there are amazing aggregators out there like Sam Matey with the The Weekly Anthropocene or Brad Johnson on Hill Heat, prolific deep divers like Matthew Yglesias on Slow Boring and climate-campaigning media innovators like Emily Atkin and prolific data-centered analysts like Hannah Ritchie, Jennifer D. Sciubba (A World of 8 Billion) and Roger Pielke Jr.. The self-described disasterologist Samantha Montano can keep you apprised of losses and efforts to stem them.

I do chase the news and sometimes still try to get ahead of it both here and on X/Twitter. I’ve decided to keep X as my main outlet for daily reality-seeking. I’ve laid out my reasons quite a few times here. (I am still testing out Threads and Bluesky but sense they are deeply constrained both technologically and in terms of who’s there and why. Please follow me on X for that kind of output.

Why Sustain What

So what is this Sustain What project for? Why should you subscribe and, for those who can afford it, chip in?

Here I’m trying to identify, utilize and convey modes of thought and action that can help you not only navigate the polluted fast-forward media and social media environment, but contribute to improving it.

In 2024, I’lm going to try to center on this goal even more, and pull back from realtime news dissection. At age 67, with book and documentary projects in the works, I don’t see an adequate return on my time investment - or yours - in simply supplying more news. I’ll be posting more of my video webcasts as podcast posts here.

You can be Thriving Online - really

My Sustain What series called Thriving Online has dozens of conversations holding insights and ideas from fantastic guides. Here’s the playlist. Please suggest future guests and subjects!

Watch words before you use them

My #Watchwords series, which I’ll be organizing better in 2024, is my effort to identify words and phrases that get tossed around far too freely in climate and sustainability communication and - like the word sustainability - only have meaning when you pause to examine your definition and those of others. Sustain What? For whom?

I wrote a post on a particularly overused word - WE. This little video snippet captures why that word fails when someone proclaims what “we” need in the context of energy.

So I hope you’ll help support me financially if able. This is particularly important now that I’m unaffiliated with an institution.

I’m deeply commited to keeping almost all of my content open to all who need it instead of only those who can afford it.

Have a productive, creative and safe year!

As promised, here are the lyrics to Prayer and a Toast.

Prayer and a Toast © 2023 Andrew RevkinFluky doesn’t even begin to describe the way life feels these days.Crisis a minute has become the norm.Worries just won’t go away.Bills are piled high, windows are barred, tread on my tires worn thin.Got such an assortment of problems,I don’t know where to begin.So I take my old dog for a seven-mile walk. Stare at the clouds in the sky.Sit on a rock on the top of a hilland just simply wonder why.Why am I here? Where am I headed? Is there an end to these woes?Then the sun peeks out and a rainbow appears,and my dog licks me on my nose.That’s when I realize things aren’t half as bad as they seem to be.I’ve got two good legs. It’s a beautiful day,and at least my dog loves me.I’ve decided to take it all a day at a time. Made myself a little oath.I’m going to start each day with a prayerand end each day with a toast.I’m going to start each day with a prayer and end each day with a toast.I get back to my house, pay one of my bills. Write a new resume.Call an old friend I haven’t seen for years.He says I made his day.He’s behind on his rent. His roof has a leak. He’s fighting with his wife.I say it sounds like you could use a little doseof my new approach to life.You see I realize things aren’t half as bad as they seem to be.I’ve got two good legs. It’s a beautiful day,and at least my dog loves me.I’ve decided to take it all a day at a time. Made myself a little oath.I’m going to start each day with a prayerAnd end each day with a toast.More on my music:

I recently ran a fascinating Sustain What webcast on one of those tangled questions that are all too common in this globalizing world of consumption and extraction: how to manage growing harvests of massive blooms of the crustaceans called krill that are also fodder for reviving populations of great whales (among other wildlife).

Listen above and share this post or do the same on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter to engage wider audiences. Also explore the rough transcript above if you can’t listen.

Krill, extraordinarily abundant in waters around Antarctica, are rich in omega-3 fatty acids that are the basis for a booming and heavily-hyped diet-supplement business and are also increasingly ending up in the manufactured meal fed to farm-raided salmon in place of ocean-caught fish.

Big ships that amount to floating factories began seining krill around that frozen continent many decades ago, led in the early days by the Soviet Union and now by Norway, with China a rising force of course. The latest report from the international Commission for the Conservation of Living Antarctic Marine Resources shows the Soviet boom and bust and the current growth:

My guests come at this issue from varied vantage points:

Joshua Goodman is a talented Miami-based Associated Press reporter who, with colleague David Keyton, led a powerful globe-spanning reporting effort on Antarctic krill, including two weeks at sea last March on a vessel operated by Sea Shepherd Global - essentially the only way to get out on the remote waters where the netting is taking place. Please explore their multimedia package. Here’s a video component:

Conor Ryan is a zoologist who splits his time between academia, conservation, education and wildlife guiding. He was on a small Lindblad cruise ship in January 2021 that came across an astonishing aggregation of fin whales - the second largest whale species - and krill seining vessels. The moment vividly illustrated the problem we discussed. He was a lead author on a paper summarizing the observations:

Commercial krill fishing within a foraging supergroup of fin whales in the Southern Ocean Ecology 104 (4), e4002

Here’s some of the video recorded that day, showing the spouting breaths of the whales with the ships in the distance - all drawn by the same krill abundance:

Nicole Bransome works on Pew’s Protecting Antarctica’s Southern Ocean project, which focuses on conserving an area that encompasses 10% of the world’s ocean through the creation of a network of large-scale marine protected areas (MPAs) around Antarctica. She wrote a recent report that is a fantastic summary of international efforts to manage this resurgent industry. Here’s a Pew video on the role of krill in the Antarctic “carbon conveyer belt”:

Aker BioMarine, the Norwegian company leading the growth in krill netting, was uanble to provide a guest for the live show (it was my fault; I’d changed the recording date and didn’t leave enough time to get them on). But they sent these talking points, several of which we address in the conversation:

* The Antarctic krill fishery is recognized globally as one of the best managed in the world.  It consists of a small number of vessels that catch less than 1% of the total biomass of krill.  

* The fishery is closely managed, monitored, and regulated by CCAMLR and the krill industry works closely with stakeholders to provide and share monitoring data to CCAMLR in support of the organization’s work to strengthen krill management.

* CCAMLR has had a committee of scientists working on krill for more than 40 years. It is by now well documented that krill is among the largest unexploited marine resource in the world, that the current krill fishery is one of the most precautionary in catches relative to stock size and that whale populations currently are increasing by up to 150%, none of which indicates that fishery poses a threat to the Antarctic ecosystem.  

* This fishery is not experiencing a “ boom” as catches are capped at 620 000 MT until CCAMLR based on scientific information decides otherwise. “Krill fishery increasing back towards the level of the mid 1980’s” is the more accurate description of the situation, and the developments over the last 10-12 years means that exploitation rate of the krill biomass in the fishery area has moved discretely from ca 0,3% to 0,8%. In 2023 the catches were roughly 420 000 MT, hence 200 000 MT short of the upper precautionary catch limit. 

* The krill fishery is a transparent fishery with on-board observer present 100% of time during fishing operations. The fishery is also one of the worlds’ cleanest fisheries as the bycatch record is second to none ref. science paper published in Fisheries Management and Ecology in 2022

* The incidents of incidental mortality of humpback whale, in total, 4 cases over 17 years occurring in 2021 and 2022, however unfortunate, are by evidence not systemic patterns but a consequence of malfunctioning mammal exclusion device that have since been improved. No new cases have occurred for two years and we intend to keep it that way.

* The mammal exclusion device as designed by Aker BioMarine is now set as best practice in industry and part of requirements when notifying for the fishery in CCAMLR

* All of the above and more are elements that contribute to the continuous MSC Certification of Aker BioMarine since 2011

The whale mortalities they describe were documented in the Associated Press report, which included photographs taken by observers from the Commission, CCAMLR.

Through most of my journalism career, I presumed that more information leads to better choices. As media moved online, I experimented ever more with conveying what I was reporting or learning using far more than the written word.

When I went to the North Pole in 2003, I brought back video that captured the unnerving dynamics and sounds of floating, drifting sea ice far better than words could. At climate negotiations in 2005 in Montreal, I tried out podcasting, recording the passionate voices of youth activists as a way to get beyond the gray-suited wonkiness of these sessions. I cobbled graphics on my Dot Earth blog and highlighted other brilliant work there and on my Sustain What webcast, like the carbon visualizations of Adam Nieman.

But what works?

From 2006 on I spent ever more time talking to behavioral scientists about paths from communicating environmental risk to susatainable societal change - and the answers were uniformly disquieting, ranging from “we don’t know” downward to sobering realities like “cultural cognition” (our hunan habit of seeing the same data through divergent cultural filters).

Here’s one such conversation, with Sabine Pahl of the University of Vienna. Pahl has focused for many years on whether and how visual information changes behavior related to environmental challenges and choices. Her work shows that visuals can matter. The results of one early study that caught my attention are here, showing that when infrared images revealing heat leaking from homes are included in flyers on weatherization, homeowners are more apt to invest in improvements.

The study is "Making Heat Visible: Promoting Energy Conservation Behaviors Through Thermal Imaging." Here's a related report: "Exploring the Use of Thermal Imagery for the Promotion of Residential Energy Efficiency.”

I recorded this conversation a couple of years ago, but never aired it. Pahl’s insights and ideas remain as fresh as ever.

Please share this post with others. I’ve set it up to stream on the Sustain What webcast as well, so you can share it with friends or colleagues on Facebook or LinkedIn.

I also encourage you to click back to watch a Sustain What episode from one year ago on a Boston University project visualizing energy trends and dynamics for climate and sustainability impact. I spoke with Cutler Cleveland, project founder and director, and Heather Clifford, the chief data scientist. That show included James Henry, a representative from MyHEAT.ca, a Canadian firm using visual information to drive energy savings and solar adoption.

Warming stripes

Also watch and share my 2021 webcast on the “warming stripes” of British climlate scientist Ed Hawkins: “Exploring Climate Visualization Frontiers on #ShareYourStripes Day”

The stripes have gotten heaps of attention (I’ve discussed some of this before), but Ph.D. candidate Ulrike Hahn, who participated in the webcast, wrote a paper showing how little is known about whether such artwork matters.

It’s important not to be swept away by the coolness factor with communication innovation. But it’s also vital to keep pushing communication frontiers.

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Here’s a parting shot from our my journey as a lecturer on a Lindblad/National Geographic cruise to Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands (see my recent post):

I hope you'll watch, share and weigh in on this invaluable Sustain What conversation I just had with Hannah Ritchie , the lead researcher at Our World in Data and author of the Not the End of the World, an invaluable book offering a data-based foundation for discussion and action on the full span of sustainability challenges and choices, from stemming warming to spurring human advancement where the need is deepest.

She’s getting an enormous amount of justified attention, including a TED Talk and a podcast session with Bill Gates (who also is a big financial supporter of Our World in Data). She’s also caught between edge-pushing data distorters or disbelievers proclaiming either doom or scam. It’s not a fun position to occupy.

I hope you’ll subscribe to, or share, Ritchie’s fine Substack dispatchSustainability by numbers! Here’s a particularly fine post:

In the second half of the chat, I asked Ritchie how she and the folks at Our World in Data deal with “qualitative data” - the meat and potatoes of social science (think of studies done by interviewing hundreds of people in a field or in a plight).

They don’t, really. I proposed that this body of science is easily as important to anyone trying to chart sustainable human pathways as the quantitative data and also proposed we plan a future webcast with scientists across disciplinary divides.

I mentioned a Sustain What webcast I did with two social scientists, Lisa Schipper and Dana Fisher, and a couple of journalists about this issue and hope you’ll check it out when you have time. Here’s a core moment with Schipper, a researcher long focused on societal factors that boost or reduce climate vulnerability.

Here’s the rest (viewing links and background): “Covering Climate Where Data are Scant and Beliefs Run Hot.”

Program note: On Tuesday, March 5th, at 2 p.m. ET, join me to explore what’s known about climate activists’ impacts on climate policy, from fossil-fueled backlash to the role of a “radical flank” in building mainstream attention.

My guest is Dana Fisher, a movement-focused sociologist who directs the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity at American University and is the author, most recently, of Saving Ourselves – From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.

Also read Fisher’s recent Nature commentary (with two coauthors): “How effective are climate protests at swaying policy — and what could make a difference?”

Join us on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube (paste your preferred link in your calendar now):

Thank you for reading Sustain What. This post is public so feel free to share it.

📺 🎧 This is the podcast episode for the post below on a consequential scoop by a Brazilian environmental journalist revealing how the confessed murderer of an environmental hero in the western corner of the Amazon River basin 35 years ago quietly rose to regional influence under a religious nickname 1,500 miles to the east. My guests are:

* Cristiane Prizibisczki, the O Eco journalist who broke the story

* Angélica Mendes, Chico Mendes’s granddaughter, who has a biology Ph.D. and is president of Comitê Chico Mendes

Why should anyone outside of the region pay attention to the reemergence of Darci Alves Pereira as “Pastor Daniel” in Medicilândia, a remote Amazonian town of only 30,000 people? This incident is a tiny window on a big and worrisome reality in Brazil.

There’s been enormous progress stanching fires and forest clearing since the election of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, but the rural right-wing and evangelical movements supporting former Presiden Jair Bolsonaro still have substantial power and Lula’s victory was by a very thin margin. And Bolsonaro and allies face an ongoing investigation of allegations of a coup attempt.

So please listen, subscribe if you don’t already and share this post with others.

Read the companion post for lots more:

Here’s some of my election coverage and here’s my post on the slain Amazon defender, Chico Mendes, and my 1990 radio interview about my book on Chico with the famed broadcaster and writer Studs Terkel.)

Here’s Medicilândia.

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I’ve spent a lot of time assessing ways to defeat what I call the “complexity monster” impeding climate and energy solutions. Here’s a Sustain What webcast on a fresh approach, including building a big welcome table instead of walls. Also watch and share on Facebook, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn. (Here’s a rough Trint transcript.)

I was intrigued to learn about an upcoming set of live seminars offering ways to stay cool, connected and effective amid the nonstop turbulence around and within our fossil-fuel-heated climate system. The workshop, called “Embracing our Emergency,” is being led later this spring by the progressive Emmy-winning filmmaker Josh Fox, best known for his HBO documentary “Gasland,” and the wide-ranging author and convener Daniel Pinchbeck.

As Fox and Pinchbeck explain in our chat, they’re convening an array of guests, from Bill McKibben to Jane Fonda and Xiye Bastida, to help build a community that can better understand and navigate today’s polycrisis. There are 10 live sessions between April 28 and May 29. You can learn more and register here. There’s a fee but they say there are discounts if needed.

A key focus, Fox says, is to encourage progressives to focus urgently on building resilience now for populations most at risk (a core theme of my writing here of course) even as they work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Another, he says, is reinforcing the reality this is a marathon, not a sprint (echoing a core theme of my Dot Earth blog):

Activism in general is like being an attention deficit disorder marathon runner. You know, you constantly think the race is going to be over the next 20 seconds. And yet it's going to go on for your whole life. So you have to constantly be re re-energizing and re-engaging.

Pinchbeck posted about the project on his Substack newsletter and there’s an excerpt below, along with a link to a free guide to “Seven Essential Tools For Surviving - and Thriving - in a Time of Climate Crisis.”👇

Some of the resulting funds from the seminars will go to helping Fox finish his latest film, “The Welcome Table,” which explores the surging flows of human dislocation and migration being propelled by hot spots of political and climatic turmoil and profound imbalances in economic opportunity.

He began reporting and filming for this project six years ago and has built a vivid worldwide picture of the lives of dislocated populations around the world and within the United States. As he explains in our conversation, the film centers on a keystone idea - that building a bigger “welcome table” is far more likely to foster thriving in the United States and elsewhere than building walls.

I reached Fox in New Orleans, where he’s preparing for the film’s grand finale - chronicling the construction of a 1,000-foot-long table on a levee threatened by rising seas and a celebratory gathering around that welcome table featuring many of the people featured in the film. You can attend on April 10.

Migrant fear, circa 1903

We talked about the cyclic nature of immigration surges and reactionary surges of nationalism and hatred. He mentioned a century-old cartoon that he found for the film, “The Unrestrictied Dumping-Ground,” which depicts Uncle Sam overwhelmed by waves of ratlike Italian immigrants. Here’s that excerpt from our discussion.

Fox said:

Can you imagine New York City without pizza? Can you imagine America without pizza, without bagels?

What is the pizza in 100 years going to be? We do know these people are going to be a benefit to us. It’s our benefit to celebrate culture rather than ostracize and criminalize. And if we haven’t learned this lesson by now we don’t know what America is.

I couldn’t agree more.

From the great clips I’ve seen, the film is coming together in Fox’s inimitable and creative style, meshing music, events and other arts with gripping footage and his wry wit. I’ll do more on the film later this year. Here’s the trailer:

One of the remarkable people in the film is the Nigeria-born singer songwriter Chris Obehi, who fled his hometown in the Niger delta in 2015 as a minor and made a harrowing journey to Palermo in Sicily including a kidnapping and imprisonment in Libya and - no surprise - a perilous Mediterranean crossing.

A profile of Obehi by Emma Wallis for the collaborative InfoMigrant news project picks up the story:

[H]e managed to make it onto an inflatable boat, and he was a couple of days into the voyage when a rescue ship arrived.

"I was crying you know. The boat was shaking and water was getting in. There were babies inside crying. We were 105 people." Again, Chris is not sure anymore which boat picked them up but he remembers the fear he felt: "It was night and this very big boat came towards us very slowly."

People were fighting, he remembers, and the boat was taking on water. Some were crying, some praying. "There were some casualties," he says with a tone of sadness in his voice. When the 'big boat' arrived, Chris saw a little boy who appeared to have become separated from his family. He says his survival instinct kicked in, and he picked him up from the boat to stop him from being crushed.

"I went close to the little boy, I touched him and he was so cold. I put him very close to me. I couldn’t just leave him alone." By taking responsibility for the infant, Chris got lifted off the ship as one of the first. In saving him, Chris was saved too. Many of the others on the boat ended up in the water.

His song Non Siamo Pesci (We are Not Fish) is simply wonderful.

Here’s Daniel Pinchbeck’s theory behind the course (from his Substack post) and the companion guide to seven tools for thriving while embracing this moment:

I feel that many people remain inactive because they toggle between two extreme positions: One common belief is that we are utterly doomed and everyone will die soon as a result of the biospheric catastrophe, hence there is nothing we can do and we might as well go on with “business as usual” until the last second. The polar opposite belief, held by many, is that new technologies will somehow save the situation without us having to massively change our lifestyles or alter our consumption habits. (The most common strategy, by far, is to ignore the situation entirely, surrender to social inertia, and wait until change is forced upon you.)

Let’s consider another option: Temperatures will rise several degrees in the next decades leading to intensifying catastrophes. Even so, the world won’t end all of a sudden. Most will survive. We will find ourselves trying to build decent lives and new communities in unfamiliar circumstances.

If we accept this as a plausible or perhaps even the most likely option, then it would be incredibly smart to start retooling, re-skilling, rethinking and even redirecting our lives, now, in resonance with the changes that are already happening and will increasingly intensify.

The seven tools and traits they describe are critical thinking, resilience, flexibility, simplicity, collaboration, openness, participation. Here’s the download:

So please share and listen to this webcast and let me know your thoughts. And please subscribe to Sustain What, and chip in financially if you can so I can justify the time required to plan and run these conversations and digest them here!

I’m also reminded of the work of the futurist and climate resilience guide Alex Steffen. When you have time, listen to our chat two years ago - and of course subscribe to his Snap Forward column:

Sick of ‘Predatory Delay’ on Climate? Snap Forward with Alex Steffen

I just had a solutions-focused waste-cutting Sustain What chat with two marvelous guides - Edward Humes, the Pulitzer-winning author of Total Garbage - How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World (following up on his 2012 book Garbology - Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash); and Sarah K. Nichols, who’s driven some of the most significant innovations in state policy around waste reduction and now works for an innovative beverage container recycling company called Clynk. There’s more about Clynk below.

Watch and share on YouTube, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and Facebook.

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Nichols, who’s featured in Humes’ book, was a prime force shaping the successful 2021 effort to expand Maine’s “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR) laws to cover packaging - making it the first state in the nation to do so, shifting the financial burden for recycling to corporations from local communities.

As the trade publication Packaging World has reported, the final regulations are emerging this year and are sorely needed, given the straining recycling budgets of many Maine municipalities (including our budget-strapped town):

Many Maine communities have suspended or cut back their recycling programs because of limited options and rising costs for managing these materials, sending them to landfills instead. With landfills throughout the state nearing capacity, this temporary solution creates another expensive problem: expanding existing landfills.

In our conversation, Nichols explained that corporations aren’t always the enemy, pointing to the leadership of one of Maine’s largest craft beer producers, Allagash Brewing Company. Read Allagash’s page extolling the virtues of EPR.

Every town needs a change-making “Marge”

I love how this section of Humes’ book on Nichols echoes what Jigar Shah, who leads the Biden administration’s loan program for clean energy, has called for - an army of local doers and changemakers willing to put in time to be sure their communities can access billions in federal assets:

Nichols worked on this for eight years, explaining that her idea wasn't a tax on businesses, as they would surely claim, but a long-overdue bill for picking up after their mess. She made her pitch, with plenty of data to back it up, at town council after town council, business by business, and during an endless number of rubber-chicken lunches and dinners with volunteer groups and civic organizations. Nichols's environmental organization is respected but small, so she recruited a statewide army of community volunteers to build support and spread the word about her recycling makeover at the local level. She calls this force her "Marges"- named for her first volunteer in an earlier environmental campaign. She defines a Marge as someone who's already an environmental advocate, but who needs some help on how to take action effectively. The Marges have become a force to be reckoned with in Maine, Nichols's not-so-secret weapon.

Similar laws are in the works in many other states and Nichols’ former employer, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, has a 10-tips sheet available for anyone elsewhere hoping to smooth the path to a more rational and effective system for reducing and recycling package.

Humes book is filled with remarkable examples of communities - with no red or blue divide - and companies finding ways to cut waste of all kinds - from trash to energy to greenhouse gas emissions. Here are a few examples from his website, edwardhumes.com:

Here’s a video primer on Clynk’s innovative approach to beverage container redemption:

Related Sustain What posts and episodes:

June 1 is the official start of hurricane season in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. To stay safe along coasts or in floodable inland areas as the season heats up, you should of course bookmark NOAA’s National Hurricane Center tracking and warning site. Don’t get too used to the storm-free image on the site at the moment:

To stay sane as the media environment around hurricanes and climate change heats up, you should bookmark NOAA’s Global Warming and Hurricanes page, curated for many years by senior scientist Tom Knutson.

Knutson is one of the most level-headed and objective scientists I know in a research arena full of competitive groups, data gaps and intense debates. It’s also an arena being flooded with money as the insurance industry and businesses needing to demonstrate or measure environmental responsibility (e.g. S&P Global) hire climate scientists and invest in modeling.

I’ve been interviewing and citing Knutson for more than 20 years and thought this week was a good time to catch up with him to go over what’s well established about the influence of warming from rising carbon dioxide concentrations on tropical storm behavior and what remains obscured by natural variability and the rarity of the biggest storms. Watch or listen above or on the audio podcast or watch and share our chat on YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn.

We talk about the “Category 6” question, the continued disagreement among researchers over the relative influences on Atlantic tropical storms of hazy air pollution and slowly shifting ocean currents and more.

There’s a super-rough Trint transcript here (they tend to be better than the one that Substack generates, at least for now). If more subscribers find it possible to chip in financially, I can get these cleaned up (and make lots of other improvements).

You may also want to click back to an evergreen interview I did around the 30th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew’s devastating hit on South Florida with the University of Miami hurricane scientist Brian McNoldy - whose Tropical Atlantic Update blog and @BMcNoldy X/Twitter feed are invaluable.

War is hell. No headline there.

But imagine war expierenced through the eyes and ears of lions, chimpanzees, camels and other creatures in a wildlife park in northeastern Ukraine, and experienced by their keepers and a ragtag crew of volunteers who rushed to evacuate them as Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion played out in 2022.

That is what you’ll experience when the documentary “Checkpoint Zoo” gets into theaters or streaming sites after its premiere at the Tribeca Festival. I hope the film gets wide distribution.

“Checkpoint Zoo” tells the story of Feldman Ecopark, a sprawling zoo and wildlife sanctuary on the outskirts of Ukraine’s second biggest city, Karkhiv, just 30 miles from the Russian border. The facility was created in 2011 by Oleksandr Feldman, one of Ukraine’s richest businessmen. A philanthropist focused on social issues, Feldman made the zoo a hub for therapy for children with disabilities and rehabilitation for drug addicts. If you scan pre-war social media, it’s all heartwarming scenes.

Then came the full-scale invasion on February 22, 2022. Five weeks in, Feldman posted an online plea for help as his staff and a passionate batch of volunteers raced to relocate the animals even as Russian attacks blasted buildings and rockets fell. Here’s Facebook video from the park in early April that year showing a shell next to animal enclosures.

Ultimately six people were killed in the animal evacuation efforts, including a 15-year-old boy, according to the film and other news reports. The park has since reopened but of course faces new threats as Russia has renewed its offensive around Karkhiv.

The film, directed by Joshua Zeman, skilfully weaves video from a trove recorded on the run by zoo staff and powerful interviews and imagery filmed by Zeman and his crew in three trips to the region in late 2022 and 2023 - during which explosions can occasionally be heard and, in one case, filmmakers and other journalists scramble for cover along with their subjects.

The result is an extraordinary portrait of the jarring mix of humanity and inhumanity created in wartime. There is heroism, wrenching loss, boundless love and a key component of any film - transformation. In this case, one of the young volunteers, a veterinarian, goes into military service as a medic.

The presence of non-human animals, as both victims and witnesses to the best and worst our species has to offer, further intensifies the experience and the leaves the viewer full of tough and essential questions.

I hope you’ll take time to watch or listen to my Sustain What conversation with Zeman. (Here’s the super rough Trint transcript.) I got to know know and respect his work through his previous documentary, “The Loneliest Whale.” That 2021 film was inspired by a short news story I wrote for The New York Times back in 2004 about the mystery of an elusive great whale in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean calling out at a frequency distinct from that of any known species.

When there’s a trailer or clip from “Checkpoint Zoo” online I’ll add it here, but in the meantime have a look at this video posted by the folks at Feldman Ecopark:

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I hope you’ll watch and weigh in on this Sustain What episode testing the arguments against climate alarm of Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist at BP and former Obama-era Energy Department science undersecretary who is the author of the best-selling book Unsettled – What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. An updated edition was eleased on June 11th.

You can also watch and share the conversation on YouTube, X/Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Koonin, who’s joining the Hoover Institution this fall as a senior fellow, has a new op-ed out in the Wall Street Journal titled “The ‘Climate Crisis’ Fades Out.” He warns that overreach based on overheated interpretations of climate science is already causing societal pushback.

We agreed on many points but I proposed that his emphasis on “unsettled/settled” as the threshold for shaping decisions can leave societies racing to pursue solutions too late because climate change is more like a one-way ratchet than a knob that can be turned back.

We were joined by Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate policy analyst you’ve seen here before. Read Pielke’s critique of Koonin’s book (which largely tracks my views):

Pielke also debated Koonin last year on the question, “Is Net Zero by 2050 Possible?” We revisited this criticism of the book taken from that debate:

Koonin’s book, which was first published in 2021 and has, according to the publisher, sold some 200,000 copies, grew out of arguments he made in an opinion piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2014. I reached out to him at that time with a couple of questions and posted them and his answers on my Dot Earth blog. Click to my announcement of this webcast for that piece, which laid the foundation for todays discussion:

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Here’s a key point I made in today’s pop-up webcast:

Think of Tornado Alley as a syndrome, not a place. And it isn’t what, and where, it used to be.

In 2018, longtime tornado researchers Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University and Harold Brooks of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., completed widely-covered research showing a substantial shift in the particular meteorological conditions that are most apt to generate tornadoes (and a shift in tornado reports).

Media coverage, then and since, has tended to zoom in on the hot question: what role is played by human-driven climate change? The science around tornadoes in a human-heated climate, however, remains infused with uncertainty.

But that murk can obscure what a new paper makes soberingly clear: that expanding populations and sources of storm vulnerability - particularly flimsy housing - are greatly increasing the risk of big losses even in areas, like Texas, with a downward trend in tornado-generating weather conditions.

The new paper, published in the Nature journal Natural Hazards, is “Changes in tornado risk and societal vulnerability leading to greater tornado impact potential.” The authors are Stephen M. Strader of Villanova University, Victor Gensini, Walker S. Ashley and graduate student Amanda N. Wagner of Villanova.

Here’s the core point from the abstract (the highlights are mine):

Results indicate that escalating vulnerability and exposure have outweighed the effects of spatially changing risk. However, the combination of increasing risk and exposure has led to a threefold increase in Mid-South housing exposure since 1980. Though Southern Plains tornado risk has decreased since 1980, amplifying exposure has led to more than a 50-percent increase in mean annual tornado-housing impact potential across the region.

I reached out to Strader for a pop-up Sustain What chat. He’s been an all-too-frequent presence in my webcasts on the “expanding bull’s eye” that far too many communities are creating in meteorological danger zones. He and Walker Ashley have done invaluable work building this method for mapping hazards, exposure and - incresaingly factoring in the vulnerability of the people or property in harm’s way, as in this paper.

I hope you’ll share our conversation here with anyone living in the map areas (lower reight) shown in red, yellow or green, or do the same with the webcast video on X/Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn.

Here are the key takeaways Strader offered in a thread on X today (which we explore in more depth and detail in the webcast):

Despite tornado environments becoming less frequent across the Southern Plains, growing exposure [more people and more stuff] has more than made up for this dearth. There has still been a 50-percent increase in Southern Plains expected tornado-society impacts due to rapidly growing exposure.

Societal vulnerability has also played a substantial role in the severity of these impacts. Most notably growing manufactured home prevalence [and] those aged 65+, non-white populations, and single-female head of households have all increased in the Southern Plains and Mid-South.

To reiterate, exposure changes are by far driving impacts, not spatial changes in environments. Unfortunately, changes in both mean bad news for the most tornado-fatality-prone region, the Mid-South.

In our discussion, we focused on a prime fixation for Strader (and me) - the boom in manufactured homes across the South.

Here’s an earlier Sustain What discussion on this point:

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There are paths to cooperation and respect amid deep difference, and - in person or online - there are strategies that can move conversations either in a constructive or destructive direction. Elected and community leaders have a rhetorical choice to make every day facing that reality. That’s true even for bullet-grazed Trump.

As I tweeted yesterday, the momentous shooting in Pennsylvania can lead to “either a tipping point toward true unraveling or a pinch point that can be navigated if Trump's team chooses moderacy over feeding its already-committed base.”

Is this a tipping point or navigable pinch point?

Trump’s base is going nowhere. Given that the party conventions mark the start of the general election campaign, it’s standard practice for candidates to pivot to moderatioin to harvest votes of doubtful or distracted voters who are less passionate.

In an interview with Salina Zeto of the conservative Washington Examiner, Trump said this:

“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger… Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches” aimed mostly at the policies of President Joe Biden. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”

At the same time, of course, a legion of Republicans jumped on the shooting to intensify “us/them” attacks on Democrats, so we’ll see how that goes…

But there’s a role here for everyone, at every level, to choose how to frame conversations and messages. With that in mind I’m reposting several Sustain What conversations that took place in the turbulent months when the pandemic, George Floyd protests and January 6th insurrection created a chaotic crescendo.

The show above, Pathways to Impact in Perilously Polarized Times, featured a marvelous array of minds and voices:

* Peter T. Coleman, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, will discuss lessons from his new book, “The Way Out - How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.”

Coleman holds a joint appointment at Teachers College and the Earth Institute and directs two research centers. He is also the author of “Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement” (2014) and “The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts” (2011), among other books.

He says “The Way Out - How to Overcome Toxic Polarization,” is “about why we are stuck in our current cultural riptide and what we can do to find our way out. It will explain how patterns of intractable polarization can and do change, and offer a set of principles and practices for navigating and healing the more difficult divides in your home, workplace and community.”

* Reggie Harris, a longtime folk singer and songwriter, storyteller and educator who has worked and sung for racial understanding, human rights and justice for decades. He’ll speak about his experiences at the interface of love and hate, Black and White and maybe sing a song or two.

He describes his album from that time, “On Solid Ground,” as a “call for personal and national grounding in the explosion of racial and civil unrest and the growing worldwide death spiral that was 2020.” Please also check out Harris’s new memoir, “Searching for Solid Ground.”

Here’s a particularly apt excerpt - Harris talking about a heated confrontation he had when Black Lives Matter and MAGA protests coincided on a town green in conservative Cobleskill in upstate New York:

Other guests were:

* Andy Norman, who teaches philosophy and directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. He says his focus is studying how ideologies short-circuit minds and corrupt moral understanding and developing tools that help people reason together in more fruitful ways. 

Norman will describe insights offered in his new book, “Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."

* Amanda Ripley, a solutions-focused journalist and bestselling author who has become a champion of a new style of journalism sifting less for sound bites and more for pathways to insight amid complexity. 

Her latest book is “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.” Here’s Ripley’s summary of this concept: “When we are baffled by the insanity of the ‘other side’—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. That’s what ‘high conflict’ does. People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.”

* Isaac Grosof, who at the time was a Carnegie Mellon grad student running the Humanist League and is now a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

More Sustain What conversations on finding common ground and traction

Just before the 2020 election I ran a related conversation with Peter Coleman, Amanda Ripley and folk singer Reggie Harris, but that show also remarkably included Wallis Wickham Raemer, an educator who is a distant, and white relative of Harris’s. His lineage goes back to a slave holder, Williams Carter Wickham, who was among those whose statues were being removed across the South. (There’s a fantastic New York Times story about the Wickhams.)

Finally, here’s a magical Sustain What 2022 conversation on “peace speech,” centering on the experience and skills built through Pádraig Ó Tuama’s many years as a mediator, gay rights voice, theologian and poet on the front lines during Ireland’s “troubles.”

Pádraig Ó Tuama & Friends on Language as a Conflict Trap or Peace Pathway

My other guests were Reggie Harris (yes, Reggie again; he is a dear friend and musical compadre from my Hudson River Valley days) and Irene O’Garden – a poet, educator and author, most recently, of the book of essays “Glad to Be Human” (and a friend).

At the time, Ó Tuama was in residence at Columbia University working with Coleman’s "Peace Speech" project with support from the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR), Teachers College, and the Climate School at Columbia University, Coleman and Ó Tuama teamed up to explore the power of language when it comes to promoting peace, security, and sustainability across the globe.

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My Sustain What webcast project started early in the pandemic and quickly evolved into having several tracks - one being regular Monday sessions I centered on pathways to Thriving Online. Here’s one of my favorites - a chat with two very different artists using drawing to communicate consequential environmental science and policy choices (also on YouTube):

Karen Romano Young (@doodlebugKRY), a seasoned science illustrator, has spent months at sea (follow her #AntarcticLog) with a focus on Antarctic science. She's also a childrens' book illustrator and author. Explore her work here.

Pat Bagley, a prize-winning political cartoonist for the Salt Lake City Tribune (@patbagley), is the longest continually employed newspaper cartoonist in the United States, with a career stretching back to 1979. In 2020, the year he was on my webcast, the National Cartoonists Society named him editorial cartoonist of the year.

Thriving online? Really?

I ended up running dozens of Thriving Online webcasts. Episodes are compiled in a YouTube playlist here: http://j.mp/thrivingonlineplaylist.

I was inspired to share this conversation after Nicole Kelner’s latest post showed up in my inbox. Kelner is a climate-focused illustrator whose Substack dispatch, Arts and Climate Change with Nicole Kelner, is a valuable mix of inspiring examples and tips for using art to propel change.

Her latest post is the first in what she says will be a weekly series highlighting examples of art that educates, inspires and offers creative outlets to deal with climate anxiety (or any other flavor):

Here’s a bit of Kelner’s own portfolio from her About page:

As you know if you’ve been tracking my output for awhile, there’s still very little data pointing to behavioral impacts of climate visualizations - even for compelling efforts like Ed Hawkins’ “warming stripes”. But there are hints, as the behavioral scientist Sabine Pahl discussed in this show:

So let the wild artistic rumpus play out.

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Update, 6:30 pm Brazil time, Aug. 31 - X flickered to life just a few minutes after I posted this, at least from my Rio hotel - just long enough for me to tweet afresh. But now it’s spinning and frozen again. So back to Threads and Bluesky for the moment.

On the final morning of a hectic three-city visit to Brazil to brainstorm with journalists, students and scientists on next steps for climate communication, Twitter ground to a halt as an order by a Supreme Court judge here took effect.

The imposed hiatus was refreshing in some ways. You may have heard my recent song about the merits of tossing your phone in a drawer once in awhile.

And it is kind of fun to see someone get under the skin of a megalomaniac. It’s no secret that I really hate much of Elon Musk’s impact on the communication practice I still call Twitter, which takes place on the platform he now calls X.

As you almost surely know, I still find Twitter uniquely valuable in navigating a host of wicked issues related to human sustainability - from climate change to disaster risk reduction to war and peace and taming information superstorms. Thanks to Musk, though, one has to don a protective suit and diver’s rebreathing system to plunge beneath the polluted surface of X and collaborate with other solution seekers.

A dangerous move in a democracy

At the same time, the move to shut down access to X in Brazil, made by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, feels like dangerous overreach.

In 2022 Moraes was given sole and extreme power to remove online content after a wave of fakery around recent elections helped trigger extremist actions by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro. That tsunami of disinformation has subsided. But in recent months Moraes has been in a running battle with Musk and X, and Musk’s decision to ignore court orders led to the shutdown.

I totally get the frustration, and if the company has violated the law, a significant response is needed. As Moraes wrote in a decision on Friday, “Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country.”

My concerns echo those of David Nemer, as described in a New York Times story on the showdown by Jack Nicas and Kate Conger:

“I was someone who was very on [Moraese’s] side,” said David Nemer, a Brazilian-born media professor who has studied his nation’s approach to disinformation at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

“But when we saw the X decision, we were like: ‘What the hell? This is too much,’” he said, using an expletive…. Justice Moraes has “set up a state of exception,” Mr. Nemer said. “But it’s a permanent state of exception, and that’s not good for any sort of democracy.”

If you read me regularly you’ll know that “state of exception” is the language used in declaring a national emergency. This came up in my reporting on efforts by some climate campaigners to get President Joe Biden to declare a “climate emergency.” A permanent state of exception can be a pathway to authoritarianism, whether initiated because of extreme storms in the information climate or the geophysical one.

As Nicas and Conger write, this is tough terrain for any democracy:

Brazil’s yearslong fight against the internet’s destructive effect on politics, culminating in the current blackout of X, shows the pitfalls of a nation deciding what can be said online. Do too little and allow online chatter to undermine democracy; do too much and restrict citizens’ legitimate speech.

Other governments worldwide are likely to be watching as they debate whether to wade into the messy work of policing speech or leave it to increasingly powerful tech companies that rarely share a country’s political interests.

As the Associated Press reported, this is not the first such move by Brazilian judge and hardly restricted to Brazil, with a host of other countries and companies doing battle over information flows:

Lone Brazilian judges shut down Meta’s WhatsApp, the nation’s most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 due to the company’s refusal to comply with police requests for user data. In 2022, de Moraes threatened the messaging app Telegram with a nationwide shutdown, arguing it had repeatedly ignored Brazilian authorities’ requests to block profiles and provide information. He ordered Telegram to appoint a local representative; the company ultimately complied and stayed online.

X and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in several countries — mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the “Twitter revolution,” but it has since been restored.

Beware “digital authoritarianism”

Waking up to frozen X took me back to a Sustain What conversation I had in January 2022 with a leading analyst of internet disruptions, Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis for Kentik, where he works on internet infrastructure analysis with a focus on disruptions, whether the cause is undersea cable damage in disasters like the 2022 Tonga volcanic eruption or political decisions. I’ve posted our chat at the top of this dispatch and hope you’ll give a listen. No one knows the issues better. A decade ago, Madory was described by the Washington Post as “The Man Who Can See the Internet.”

Also read Suppressing Dissent: The Rise of the Internet Curfew, a 2022 post by Madory and Peter Micek, which walks through the history of intentional throttling of social media by nations worried about dissent. Here’s what one such shutdown looked like in Cuba in 2022:

Also read this Conversation post: Internet shutdowns: here’s how governments do it, by Lisa Garbe, a postdoctoral research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

Of course in all of this, it’s worth noting that Musk, while yelling about free speech, has been using his total control of X to distort the landscape of converations there. No easy balance indeed.

Brazil discovers Bluesky

In the meantime, communication must continue and Diario Carioca and other news outlets reported that 500,000 Brazilians launched Bluesky accounts in 48 hours.

Thanks for reading Sustain What! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Here’s a parting shot from Rio de Janeiro:

Updated February 2025 - Given what’s unfolding under Trump 2.0, I thought it worth highlighting a Sustain What conversation I had in December 2020 with University of Rhode Island communications professor Renee Hobbs, who teaches propaganda literacy and is the author of a fantastic guide book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age. She has built a priceless suite of online learning tools to explore and share.

I’ll be holding an onstage conversation with Hobbs at the Bioneers Conference in Berkeley, Calif., on March 28. Come meet us in person!

She provides a fantastic overview of the range of propaganda strategies, tactics and tools, noting the word should be seen as neutral. There is “good” propaganda. But, boy, there is dangerous propaganda, as well.

Emergency mode

A key section of our conversation dealt with the kind of dangerous political propaganda that is in overdrive right now.

I told Hobbs about a conversation I had earlier in 2020 with New York University journalism professort Jay Rosen, when he was warning newsrooms that democracy was in danger in the face of Trump’s nonstop lies and this required new approaches to reporting and presenting the news. Here’s that snippet from Jay, in which he said, “I think we’re facing the biggest propaganda moment in modern U.S. history.”

Keeping in mind what transpired amid the pandemic, and even more so the following January, he was surely right. And here we are again.

In December 2020, Hobbs wholeheartedly concurred with his perspective:

I have a sure sense of urgency. The fire hose of falsehood…actually goes way, way back. That's not a new technique either…. Actually throughout the 20th century, we have faced crises where propagandists had ascendency, where their ideas gained traction, and where only with a relentless pursuit of truth, only with the public activation of moral indignation, only over time can can truly dangerous propaganda be be countered. So we're in that place right now. And we're very vulnerable.

And, yes, here we are yet again. So please listen up and share this converastion.

There’s a (very) rough searchable transcript here. Transcripts can be smoothed out if more of my subscribers chip in financially.

I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber to help sustain my work and keep this content open for those who can’t afford to pay.

And please explore Hobbs’s fantastic array of open learning resources! There’s a whole section on “meme politics.” There’s a crowd-sourced “rate this propaganda” gallery.

Here’s my full April 2020 conversation with Jay Rosen:

The Press, the Pandemic and Presidential Propaganda

First, here’s my freshly updated post offering a heap of ways anyone anywhere can help the organizations and volunteers working nonstop around Hurricane Helene devastation zones:

Second, here’s a shoutout to the professional and volunteer first responders doing highly dangerous work seeking and rescuing survivors. Several are among the more than 215 victims so far. The North Carolina National Guard has been working nonstop.

Finally, please watch or listen to my Sustain What conversation seeking lessons from the catastrophic inland flooding triggered when Hurricane Helene's remnants collided with the Appalachian Mountains. My guest is David McConville, a data visualizer and risk communicator (his company is Spherical Studio) who grew up in the regions hammered by Helene and lived and worked in Asheville for many years trying to use technology, including a visualization dome, to convey the flood threat in the steep hills and deep hollows there. I got to know McConville after meeting him in Asheville when I spoke at wonderful Warren Wilson College there. We bumped into each other off and on in our separte, but related, journeys trying to figure out how to use media to foster sustainable human journeys.

As the catastrophic scope of the historic flooding in the region emerged last weekend, McConville said this on Facebook:

My heart is breaking today for many close friends in Asheville and western North Carolina, where I lived for over 20 years.

I’m also feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu. The catastrophic flooding of Hurricane Frances in 2004 got me interested in visualizing the dynamics of watersheds, impervious surfaces, and property development within bioregions.

I created the visualization below 15 years ago with The Elumenati and collaborators to help policymakers better grasp these dynamics and their consequences. Eerily, it features simulations of flooding in Biltmore Village, the real-world versions of which are currently all over the news.

He continued:

“Spherical is continuing this work in Los Angeles with Andy Lipkis, whose work on urban resilience was similarly catalyzed by his experience with flash floods in LA. As Daniel Swain notes, the looming threat of California's next ARKStorm bears striking parallels to what southern Appalachia is currently facing:

If you’ve been following me for awhile you already know about the history and future of extreme atmospheric rivers, with a repeat of the 1861-2 event that created an inland sea inevitable, if its timing remains uncertain. But here’s an excerpt from, and link to, climate and weather scientist Swain’s great thread and here’s a post of his from 2022 on this threat, amplified by human-caused global warming.

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The wider picture of disaster amnesia

In the webcast McConville and I talk about the challenges in trying to get communities like Asheville to act on data showing profound, but rare, hazards. It’s not easy.

In our chat he notes such warnings can end up just as ignored as Japan’s ancient, moss-encrusted “tsunami stones” were as generations forgot the warnings of ancestors who carved phrases like this into large tablets set on hillsides above the reach of great rare waves:

High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants…. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.

This is something I wrote about back in 2011:

I did a highly relevant Sustain What conversation some months back with Daniel Starosta, who studies the art, music, and history produced in the wake of disasters to better understand the social dynamics that can either impede or boost preparedness facing future threats.

Starosta’s research has spanned the landscape of disaster from hurricanes in Florida to tsunamis in Japan. He also works in climate adaptation and disaster resilience planning, with experience from Puerto Rico to Hawai'i to Bhutan. Here’s that conversation:

Exploring Disasters, Culture, Forgetfulness and Preparedness

Here’s the podcast version of my “Watchwords” conversation with Mekala Krishnan, the lead author of a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, “The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition.” I use the term watchwords to highlight terms or phrases that too often confuse more than clarify.

We were joined halfway through by Jessica Lovering, the co-founder and exective director of Good Energy Collective, which has a its mission “building the progressive case for nuclear energy as an essential part of the broader climate change agenda and working to align the clean energy space with environmental justice and sustainability goals.”

My curtain-raiser post has other ways to watch and share it:

Julio Friedmann, a friend and past colleague (at Columbia), has also written a fine post on this study and his own analysis. As he writes, there’s “a reluctance by many to confront the realities of The Hard Stuff: the parts of The Work that are costly, challenging, poorly framed, and utterly necessary.”

Here’s the Scale Monster image I deploy on social media off and on. Free free to share it!

As you likely know, this dispatch and webcast are mostly a labor of love now - but it is labor. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This is the podcast version of my Sustain What show on an illuminating Washington Post story on issues and insights around the newsmaking and much-cited “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” assessments by NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I’ve been deeply impressed with Harry Stevens’ reporting on climate at the Washington Post in his Climate Lab columns. He’s outdone himself with a big new analysis of the insights and issues around the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s much-covered tally of “billion dollar weather and climate disasters” from extreme climate events. Gift link: http://wapo.st/3YiJgaz. The key takeaways are:

* The tracking project is valuable but there are lots of important questions about how the disasters are measured and compiled.

* Frequent efforts by elected officials, activists and climate-centric journalists to use the surge in billion-dollar disasters as evidence of human-driven climate change have no solid basis in data.

We were joined by Jessica Weinkle, a researcher at the interface of climate and society at the University of North Carolina, Wilmigton. She’s writing up a storm on Substack on her Conflicted dispatch and on Breakthrough Journal. In a recent Breakthrough Institute post on the expanding bull’s eye of vulnerable development in coastal North Carolina, she included just one of countless visuals demonstrating that humans are worsening climate risk far faster on the ground than they are through the heat-trapping influence of greenhouse gases on the global climate:

Please watch or listen here and share our discussion on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or the recorded stream on X at @revkin.

Here’s the “curtain raiser” post from this morning:

Since I left my gig at Columbia University, I’ve been fully independent. If you like what I’m doing with Sustain What, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

UPDATED 10/28 9 am - As I’ve written before, no real progress on the issues I explore here on Sustain What is possible without sustaining democracy and moving past racism and hate, so I had to cover tonight’s hate-filled Trump “rally.”

As Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event was getting into gear on Sunday afternoon, I reached out to Marshall Curry, an Academy-Award winning film director.

I was hoping to interview him because in 2017 he made a stunning seven-minute documentary called “A Night at the Garden” built with rediscovered film footage of the February 1939 rally at the venue organized by the German American Bund, a pro-Hitler organization that was inflaming passions here in the years before the United States entered World War II.

It turned out Curry was in line outside the Garden amid thousands of MAGA-hatted Trump fans.

Curry was there shooting a documentary following the work of a major magazine that had two journalists in the hall (details can’t be released yet). Once he was in the building, in between hate-filled speeches from the podium, we were able to connect by phone. I’ve posted the conversation above and you can also watch and share it on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter.

I got to know Curry starting in 2011, when I wrote for The New York Times about his “brutally neutral” film (my description) centered on the life of an Earth Liberation Front arsonist environmentalist and the federal prosecutor who pursued the group for years.

In our conversation Curry stresses that he doesn’t see Trump as a Nazi, but did find the level of vitriol in the hall deeply chilling - and at a level far beyond what he’s seen in even the most passionately anti-Trump Democrats.

As he expalined:

I still don’t think Trump is a Nazi but I do think he’s a demagogue and I do think he uses a lot of these same tactics demagogues have used for thousands of years – to kind of stir people up against each other and grab power in the process.

Please do listen and weigh in with your thoughts.

I watched the first hour or so of warmup acts and was appalled at several points, particularly by Rudolph W. Giuliani’s vile diatribe lumping all Palestinians - including the “good people” - in one unwelcome boat.

I hope that any voters in swing states whose prime concern is the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people drop any plans to skip voting for Kamala Harris.

In the meantime, Fox News had a very different impression of the “historic rally.”

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Take a mental break and do tell me how you stay sane and centered given the turbulence of this political and societal moment and the tough path ahead?

For me - along with our dogs, cooking, carpentry, hikes and the like - there’s always music. (Read my post explainng that side of my life if you haven’t already.)

This new song of mine, “After the Roaming,” was inspired by a melody composed by fellow student Kathy O'Rourke during our current songwriting workshop at Bagaduce Music in Blue Hill, Maine. (We were each tasked by the teacher, George Emlen, to create a couple of simple melodies and then were asked the following week to write lyrics to a melody other than our own.)

The lyrics are below.

Life’s a very fine line right now

I’m planning to pull together this tune and a batch of my recent original songs into my first album since my debut recording in 2013, “A Very Fine Line.” That tune, I realize, is also highly relevant given that one line is as follows:

It’s a very fine line between loony and sane.A very fine line between a loss and a gain.A very fine line between pleasure and pain.Most of your life you spend walking a very fine line.People you think are a genius are this far from bent.President blows an election by half a percent.We all know love hurts but we try it again and again.We know that the line between love and despair is so thin.

Chip in via the subscription box here if you want to help support the musical part of what I do, as well:

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Here’s “After the Roaming.” Snag an audio download at Revkin.Bandcamp.com or share the video version on YouTube below.

After the Roaming

© 2024, Andrew Revkin

I’ve fished the ocean, and I’ve plowed the ground.

I’ve toppled timber and rambled around.

But in all my roaming, two things I can’t find:

A loving companion and true peace of mind.

A loving companion and true peace of mind.

When a lad leaves his home to go out on his own

His work and his friends are his life.

But the job and the beer in the end bring no cheer

Compared to the arms of a wife.

So I’ll sell my boat, drop the plow and the axe.

I’ll woo a sweet woman and finally relax.

After all of that roaming, two things will be mine:

A loving companion and true piece of mind.

A loving companion and true piece of mind.

This new talk is the latest iteration of what I’ve learned and unlearned through 40 years of reporting and conversation wrangling around the intertwined challenges of building a safer human relationship with the climate system and with energy.

My focus, echoing my goals in these dispatches, was conveying how to get beyond amorphous labels like sustainability and climate emergency by asking productive questions, starting with “Sustain what?”

Watch or listen above and share this post, or watch and share on YouTube:

I gave the talk for the Jay Heritage Center, a nonprofit group on a historic estate once owned by John Jay, one of America’s Founding Fathers and its first Supreme Court Chief Justice. The estate is a refuge for people and wildlife tucked between the busy 1-95 corridor through Westchester County, N.Y., and Long Island Sound. The center is working to make the park into what it calls an “educational campus, hosting innovative and inclusive programs about American history, historic preservation, social justice, and environmental stewardship.”

In a story for the Rye Record, reporter Jacqui Wilmot nicely summarized my core point:

While early climate reporting focused on the science and data, he said, he came to recognize the need to go beyond the numbers and engage communities in dialogue. He seeks out conversations that transcend political divides, looking to find common ground and practical ways forward on climate change….

“How do you manage a complexity monster like climate change?” Revkin asked. “You break it into parts. Shouting ‘climate emergency’ is vague for most people, unless you can break it down into actionable steps. Moving beyond traditional storytelling means encouraging productive conversations and empowering communities to act, adapt, and build resilience together.”

Please watch and weigh in - and share this post of course to grow our community and help others learn how to tame, if not defeat, the climate “complexity monster.”

Sustain What is a reader-supported project. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here’s the video and audio podcast of my #SustainWhat show offering a valuable update on trends in emissions of heat-trapping methane and emerging science showing the tropics are the dominant driver of the recent rise in the flows of this potent greenhouse gas. Listen and share and weigh in. Background on my guests along with a batch of relevant links are in the “curtain raiser” post below.

Here are some additional sources we touched on in the conversation that weren’t in my initial post:

* Human activities now fuel two-thirds of global methane emissions (Global Carbon Project, R B Jackson et al 2024 Environ. Res. Lett. 19 101002)

The distribution of emission changes from 2000 to 2020 by latitude emphasizes the tropics, which contribute an estimated ∼60%–70% of the total global change over the last two decades for both approaches (BU: 45 [29–68] Tg CH4 yr−1; TD: 36 [6–47] Tg CH4 yr−1) (table 2). Mid-latitudes are responsible for the additional 30%–40% increase in global emissions; in contrast, emissions from higher latitudes (60–90°N) are estimated to be stable or to have decreased slightly, attributable to slightly decreasing anthropogenic emissions (table 2).

* Microbes, not fossil fuels, are behind recent methane surge - Climate.gov staff, Oct. 29, 2024

* Maine Farmers Receptive to Seaweed Feed - Survey highlights receptiveness of organic dairy farmers to feeding methane-reducing feeds

* Atmospheric methane removal may reduce climate risks (Sam Abernethy and Robert B Jackson, Environmental Research Letters, April 12, 2024)

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I hope you heard (or now watch) my 2021 conversation with the Cambridge University climate researcher Mike Hulme and science and propaganda historian Naomi Oreskes on trust and mistrust in climate science.

The same goes for our 2023 conversation about his latest book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything, which describes what he calls “climatism” - a tendency in climate-policy discussions to put CO2 reduction in the foreground no matter what the issue is. I’ve loaded it above and here we are on YouTube:

If you really want to dive in, explore my New York Times articles drawing on his insights as far back as 2007.

But I also hope you’ll read this recent reflective essay he posted on his website - reposted here with permission. Hulme describes lessons that emerged through 40 years of climate scholarship and the evolution, and sometimes devolution, of public debate and related policies.

I agree wholeheartedly with much of his reasoning. Maybe it’s because we’ve both been at this long enough to see patterns others miss in the rush to the new, and long enough to recognize when our initial internal narratives around climate change and energy transitions no longer match the evidence.

Geopolitics, History and Climate Change: A Personal View

by Mike Hulme

“To think that we can draw some useful analogies from history dramatically underestimates the novelty and scale of the climate challenge.”[2]

“In the contest between geopolitics and sustainable climate policies, the former takes precedence.”[3]

Starting in the early 1980s, I have spent my entire professional life studying climate change, as well as teaching, writing and speaking about it in universities, conferences, and public forums around the world—in 43 countries at the latest count. With such a professional and personal investment in the idea of climate change, it is not surprising that for a long period I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century.

Since first immersing myself in the topic in the 1980s, and subsequently being part of the scientific and public story of climate change in the 1990s and 2000s[4], I was easily convinced that the growing human influence on the world’s climate would be a reality that all nations would increasingly need to confront, a reality to which their interests would necessarily be subservient and that would be decisive for shaping their development pathways. For more than half of these 40 or so years, it seemed to me self-evident that relations between nations would forcibly be re-shaped by the exigencies of a changing climate.

But now, in the mid-2020s, I can see that I got this the wrong way round. And I can also see why this was so. Rather than geopolitics having to bend to the realities of a changing climate, the opposite has happened. The unyielding force of political realism—the pursuit of the changing and unpredictable interests of nations and great powers—means that the framing, significance, and responses to climate change need continually to adapt to shifting geopolitical realities. Except that too often they haven’t. Whilst the world’s climate has undoubtedly changed over these 40 years, the geopolitics, demography, and culture of the world has changed even more.[5] Too often the language, rhetoric, and campaigning around climate change remains wedded to a world that no longer exists.

***

The crucial period which shaped my own (mis-)reading of the prospective power and salience of climate change in the twenty-first century—and many other people’s mis-reading; I was not alone in this—was the ten years between 1985 and 1995, now more than a third of a century ago. This period marked the apogee of optimistic thinking about “a new world order”—in the words of George Bush senior—and about “the end of history”—in the words of Francis Fukuyama. It was marked by the rise of market globalization, the triumph of liberal democracy over state-sponsored communism, and the blithe promise of a world energy transition. In short, this optimism was fueled by the rise of globalism; thinking strategically about climate change was caught-up in this zeitgeist.

It was during these ten years that the dominant public narrative of climate change took shape, what Dan Sarewitz later called “the plan”.[6] “The plan”, according to Sarewitz, had two components: one, that scientific knowledge about climate change would lead to action by compelling a convergence of people’s worldviews around the need to take action; and, two, that this convergence of understanding would translate into a consequent convergence around what needs to be done. “The plan” appealed and gained pre-eminence among those who, like me, accepted Fukuyama’s unidirectional progressive view of history. In his famous 1989 essay, Fukuyama proposed that the post-Cold War era would see the replacement of “worldwide ideological struggle” with “the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”[7] Climate change seemed to be ripe for such technological solutionism; and many believed it. I did too.

During those ten years, and leaking (just) into the twenty-first century, western values were casually presumed to be universal. And it was (just about) possible to imagine that the new harmony of nations might unite behind the primacy of America’s ‘benign’ world leadership. Forty years of Cold War had ended, 80 years of ideological struggle between liberal democracy and communism were over. It was, according to Fukuyama, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”[8] In similar vein, Beck’s “cosmopolitan manifesto” was published in 1998, inserting ideas about world citizenship and ethical globalization firmly into the western mind.[9]

Yet this mood of optimistic globalism was dangerous. Writing retrospectively in 2023 about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the political historian Timothy Garton-Ash explains the danger: “…deep down we somehow thought – or more accurately, felt – that we knew which way history was going. This is always a mistake and one that historians should be the last people on earth to make.”[10]

Around this time, the primacy of western science was reflected in the forging of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created by the UN in 1988, and first reporting in 1990, the IPCC gave the imprimatur of governmental backing to universal climate scientific knowledge as an authoritative guide to climate policy. The UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated in 1992, and ratified in 1995. Subsequent annual Conferences of the Parties to the Convention would hammer out the new institutions, policies and measures around which the world would unite to tame the climate change threat. It was an echo of how scientists had discovered the ozone hole in 1985 and how negotiators had crafted the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and its subsequent amendments, to repair the damage. Climate science’s ascendant power was eventually to lead to the IPCC receiving a joint share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. The new global science of climate change seemed to reign supreme.

Yet by 2007, the illusion under which I had been working—that geopolitics would bend to the force of concern over climate change—was already ending. The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, ratified in 2004, had yielded next to nothing in terms of emissions reductions. Also running out of steam was Tony Blair’s campaign of international climate diplomacy conducted during the years 2003-2005, a self-conscious attempt to harness the moral high ground following the geopolitical disaster of the British Government’s support for the 2003 Iraq war. More significantly, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was the prelude to this disillusionment, and the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade Bill to pass in the US Senate in the summer of 2009 the main act. And the denouement came in December 2009 at COP15, billed as ‘the most important meeting in human history’. During a few days in a wintery Copenhagen, China’s growing political and economic muscle was firmly exercised, the impotence of the EU’s climate diplomacy revealed, and the limits of late twentieth century internationalism exposed.

The curtain finally came down on Sarewitz’s so-called “plan” during the (northern) 2009/10 winter of climate discontent. In November 2009, the western world was blind-sided by the Climategate controversy over leaked emails between corresponding scientists, and in the early months of 2010 its confidence in climate science further undermined by several challenges to the IPCC’s trust and credibility.

Meanwhile, the important geopolitical action was taking place elsewhere.

While we weren’t watching, something else was afoot at the turn of this decade. The forces of deglobalization were gathering, coinciding with climate’s ‘cultural turn’—the belated recognition that science is not enough to drive change, that science is never enough[11]—and the beginning of the west’s cultural solipsism and fragmentation. The (short-lived) Arab Spring of 2011 culminated in the decade-long Syrian Civil War and fractious ethnic nationalisms gathered pace, first in Russia and then in the USA, Brazil and parts of eastern Europe. And all the while, China’s belt-and-road initiative was beginning to tighten.

So how did the framing and campaigning around climate change respond in the early-mid-2010s to these compounding geopolitical trends? By doubling down on what had worked before. In other words, it responded by offering new science, more science, more scary science. Science was used to reframe what climate change seemed to demand of the world. Carbon budgets replaced emissions scenarios and the idea of ‘net-zero’ emissions was born[12]; theoretical world decarbonisation pathways to achieve net-zero were modelled to keep alive the illusion that a rapid global energy transition was possible[13]; weather attribution science was created as a new tool to drive home the imminence of climate change to a sceptical public; and the language of ‘loss and damage’ emerged to appease the concerns of the developing world. And, finally, in 2015, under the rhetorical weight of this new science, the old policy target of limiting warming to 2°C was reinvented in Paris as “1.5°C”, without a flicker of realization of the impossibility of what was implied by such a number.

It was believed—hoped?—that the world could, and the world would, bend to this demand. If climate change was ‘the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century’ then it needed to live up to this billing. Deadlines were set—“we have 12 years to limit climate catastrophe”[14]; language was re-set—from climate change to climate crisis[15], from global warming to global weirding; doomist narratives foregrounded[16], emergencies declared, extinction envisaged, and street protests unleashed. Each new realization of just how far away the world was from placing “stopping climate change” at the centre of today’s politics provoked a reaction: science was enrolled—through the IPCC’s 1.5°C Report in 2018; the rhetoric of tipping points was ramped-up; the young (through Greta Thunberg) and then the old (through female Swiss pensioners[17]) were used as cat’s paws to deliver chimerical feel-good victories; environmental lawyers co-opted Indigenous peoples to use the west’s legal system to try to deliver what the world’s nations stubbornly refused to deliver.

And all along, Putin laughed, China’s soft power—and not-so-soft power—grew, India dissented, the Emerging and Middle Income Countries arrived, African nations kept adding people to the planet. And the worldwide demand for energy continued to rise.

In Europe, too, the climate project began to sour. Between 2016 and 2020 the UK ‘brexited’ the EU collective, Russian gas flooded the continent before the Ukraine war in 2022 revealed the EU’s vulnerability to imperialist aggression, everywhere nativism seemed to flex new political muscles, and climate scepticism found new expressions: among farmers, motorists, and France’s gilet jaunes. Even then, some still held on to the old certainties that the fossil fuel industry represented the evil “eye of Sauron”, calling upon all well-meaning people in the world to join forces in a “final battle” to defeat the rapacious enemy.[18]

There was a brief flicker of hope in 2020/21 when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. But Pielke’s iron law of climate policy—’when environmental and economic objectives are placed into opposition with one another in public or political forums, the economic goals win out’—could not be broken.[19] Even a global pandemic could not subvert the inertia of the world’s energy pathway and the unyielding self-interest of world powers.

Climate campaigners and youth activists once again failed to grasp the nature of the problem. A fringe group of scientists—Scientists’ Rebellion—joined ever more extreme public protests, Just Stop Oil adopted ever more bizarre tactics, the UN Secretary-General offered ever more heated rhetoric about the world a-boiling[20], and the liberal media headed by The Guardian and New York Times amplified climate alarmism, eco-anxiety, chest-beating, and flight, meat and birth shaming. Taking their cue from David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 book, ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, Netflix tried a new line in releasing the film‘Don’t Look Up’ in December 2021. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio this apocalyptic satire compares climate change to an asteroid locked in on destring planet Earth.

But climate change is not an asteroid heading for Earth. If it were, then maybe the megalomanic technology of solar geoengineering—currently being talked up in Washington, Tokyo and Singapore[21]—might, just might, be worth taking a punt. Neither is climate change the result of capitalism.[22] Thinking so, suggests Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, offers only “an apparently radical but ultimately reassuring story [which] underestimates the immensity of the climate challenge. Getting out of carbon will be far more difficult than getting out of capitalism.”[23] Climate change is locked into state-sponsored oil extraction, Indian coal, Africa’s demography, China’s unwavering self-interest packaged in warm climate-sounding words, and the legitimate aspirations of half of the world’s population for the benefits of high-energy modernism. Eradicate capitalism and all these things would remain.

***

So this has been my 40-year journey with climate change, initially from idealist to pragmatist, and now from pragmatist to realist. It is not a particularly hopeful story-arc, but then why should I, or anyone else, ever think that climate change was going to offer one? There is no hidden hand—least of all the benign hand of science—guiding the world to a safe climate-landing. There is no happy ending; we stumble from one thing to the next. Again, why did I or anyone else think there would be? Francis Fukuyama was profoundly wrong in 1989: not only was history not ending in the 1990s, it had barely got started.

One has to go where one believes the truth lies. For me, initially this was the scientific truth of a warming world, to which much of my early research contributed, and the derivative belief that the world would fall into line, guided by the science of the IPCC and the enlightened diplomacy of the UNFCCC. This belief rested on a naïve rationalism, the sort recently expressed in a Nature editorial when claiming that “Science-based decision-making is what will ultimately help the world to resolve the crises it faces”.[24]

Now, 30 years later, it is the geopolitical truth that power and interests win out. Climate is not the only thing that is changing through our lifetimes, and perhaps not the most important thing. Technology, cultural values, the centres of political, economic and military power have all changed remarkably since I first started studying climate change 40 years ago; and the rules, cohesion and effectiveness of the international order that I assumed were eternal are being seriously called into question. I now see the need for a deeper reading of political realism and power, that goes beyond seeing science as a coercive force that trumps geopolitics, beyond appeals to a superficial cosmopolitanism. To use the language of Jason Maloy at Louisiana University, climate change is neither an emergency or a crisis; it is a political epic, “a process of collective human effort that features gradual progression through time, obscure problem origins, and anticlimactic outcomes.”[25]

The best that we can say is that the world will continue slowly to decarbonize its energy system and, at the same time, the Earth will continue slowly to warm. And societies will continue to adapt to evolving climate hazards in new ways, as they have always done, with winners and losers along the way.

© Mike Hulme, January 2025

This essay was inspired by Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Atlantic Books, 2009) and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Allen Lane, 2024).

[2] p.13 in: Fressoz,J-B. (2024) More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. London: Allen Lane.

[3] Advertising blurb for Toal,G. (2024) Oceans Rise, Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[4] Summarised, for example, in my 2013 book: Hulme,M. (2013) Exploring Climate Change Through Science and in Society: An Anthology of Mike Hulme’s Essays, Interviews and Speeches. Abingdon: Routledge.

[5] See Reich,R. (2022) Putin and Trump have convinced me: I was wrong about the 21st century. The Guardian, 13 March.

[6] Sarewitz,D. (2011) Does climate change knowledge really matter? WIREs Climate Change. 2(4): 475-481.

[7] p.18 in: Fukuyama,F. (1989) The End of History? The National Interest. 16(Summer): 3-18.

[8] Ibid. p.4

[9] Beck,U. (1998) The Cosmopolitan Manifesto. New Statesman. 20(4377): 28-30.

[10] pp.240-241in: Garton-Ash,T. (2023) Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. Vintage Books.

[11] Hulme,M. (2011) Meet the humanities. Nature Climate Change. 1(4): 177-179; also, Hulme,M. (2015) Editor’s introduction: the cultures of climate. pp.xxiii-xlviii in: Climates and Cultures: SAGE Library of the Environment. Hulme,M. (ed.), London: SAGE.

[12] Lahn,B. (2020) A history of the global carbon budget. WIREs Climate Change. 11(3): e636.

[13] Fressoz 2024, op. cit.

[14] Watts,J. (2018) We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN. The Guardian. 8 October.

[15] Zeldin-O’Neill,S. (2019) ‘It’s a crisis, not a change’: the six Guardian language changes on climate matters. The Guardian. 16 October.

[16] Wallace-Wells,D. (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Allen Lane.

[17] BBC (2024) European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction. 9 April.

[18] p.254 in: Mann,M. (2021) The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. New York: Public Affairs.

[19] Pielke,R.jr. (2010) The Climate Fix: Why Decades of Magical Thinking Have Not Solved Global Warming – and What To Do About It. New York: Basic Books.

[20] Gutierres,A. (2023) Hottest July ever signals ‘era of global boiling has arrived’ says UN chief. UN Global News. July 27.

[21] McLaren,D. and Corry,O. (2025) Solar geoengineering research faces geopolitical deadlock. Science. 387(2 January): 28-30.

[22] Klein,N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[23] p.8 in: Fressoz, 2024, op cit.

[24] Anon (2024) UN summits: one step forward, two steps back. Nature. 19/26 December. 636:521.

[25] Maloy,J.S. (2024) Beyond crisis and emergency: Climate change as a political epic. Ethics & International Affairs. 38(1): 103-125.

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This is the podcast version of the Sustain What discussion I just had with the relentless clean-energy optimist, investor and evangelist Michael Liebreich. Key sections are on the need to switch metrics for success from kilowatt/hours to energy services; the ethics of focusing decarbonization on the most carbonized nations; the potential for energy-hungry AI giants to help United States regions revive wider grid reliability and clean-energy sourcing; and the possibility of having constructive conversations on sustainable energy abundance with the soon-to-be Trump Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

Here’s the curtain-raiser post with all the background!

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Here’s the podcast / webcast version of my talk with Tom Kalil, who’s moved from advising two presidents on science and technology policy to building Renaissance Philanthropy, a consultancy for wealthy people who want to help fill funding and capacity gaps to help science serve society and sustainability.

We talked about that work and also about the challenges and some possibilities as the second Trump presidential term gets into gear.

Here’s the curtain raiser with lots of relevant links:

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I’ll wager that most of you have already heard or read Ezra Klein’s powerful audio “Don’t Believe Him” manifesto examining Trump’s take on Steve Bannon’s longstanding “flood the zone” strategy designed to overwhelm media and institutional capacity to convey and challenge his unfolding demolition derby presidency.

If not, here’s the captivating opening. But it’s vital to get past the initial statement about Bannon’s strategy.

In his piece, Klein notes Trump is already getting caught up in his own flood tides, with initial overreaching steps already facing legal setbacks and more resistance likely.

That may add up and stall Trump out in the long run, but in the short run substantial human harm is unfolding. Read Nicholas Kristof today for the impacts at the US Agency for International Development: The World’s Richest Men Take On the World’s Poorest Children.

After watching Klein, I wondered what my old friend Randy Olson - a brutally honest communication strategist - would think about how the wide-field “flooding the zone” strategy relates to Trump’s superskill - holding to an almost primally simplistic story line.

Listen to our pop-up Sustain What chat above and/or please share this post or share the webcast on X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube.

Olson began his professional life as a marine biologist, shifted to filmmaking and now mainly works with science-based organizations to improve their impact through refining their narrative strategies. He’s produced a batch of books that amount to workouts at what he calls The Narrative Gym.

Here are just a few of the books and other references Olson cited or recommended in our conversation:

* I brought up a new study showing a pattern of u-turns toward healthier democracy after autocrats take and then lose power (I’m planning a chat with the authors); Randy countered with a sobering December 2016 New York Times column by Eduardo Porter referencing The Great Leveler, a book by Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, who found:

From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality. There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s not pretty: violence.

* He noted the relationship of the zone flooding strategy to the “Gish Gallop,” which emerged from the creationism arguments of Duane Gish.

* Read The Economics of Attention - Style and Substance in the Age of Information, by Richard A. Lanham.

* Read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In the short run, you might read the 2017 Guardian op-ed by Postman’s son Andrew Postman: “My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World.”

* Read Gary Keller’s bestseller The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results, or watch the scene in the 1991 film “City Slickers” when the crusty cowboy played by Jack Palance tells Billy Crystal’s character about the importance of pursuing “one thing.”

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Here’s one of my earlier Sustain What chats with Randy:

Is science communication really worse than it was 100 years ago? Can simplicity help?

Click here for my Randy Olson coverage in The New York Times.

Here’s a fresh tune for these times from my songwriting side, which has been energized since I signed on to a two-decade-old annual project called February Album Writing Month (FAWM.org). There’s more below about this remarkable effort - aimed at getting participants to write 14 songs in 28 days (yes, FOURTEEN!) - including a video explainer by its founder, Burr Settles, a machine learning researcher focused on language learning at DuoLingo and, of course, on music. I hope to interview him soon.

My new song, Save Dreams for Sleeping, is still in beta mode. I’ve been trying various chord and melody approaches and instruments. But given what’s going on in the early weeks of the Trump Vance Musk administration I don’t want to hold off.

Below you can listen to another topical song by me and find links to some other off-the-news songs from #FAWM2025 and my favorite #fastfolk musician, Jesse Welles.

Save Dreams for Sleeping

© 2025, Andy Revkin, Written Feb. 4, 2025

We all hold a dream somewhere deep in our minds,

Where everything’s fair and everyone’s kind.

Flowers all blooming, no smoke in the skies.

No wars in the headlines, no tears in your eyes.

But save dreams for sleeping. It’s time to get real.

Hard workers are suffering while billionaires steal.

Young women in trouble can’t find caring hands.

House builders born elsewhere get bundled in vans.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crimes.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the storm.

A more perfect union will start being born.

Our country needs mending, but how to begin?

With problems so tangled, no start and no end?

Reach out to a stranger. Get out of your pack.

Find what you agree on and walk that one track.

The trust that you build - day by day, two by two -

Will carry us further than fighting will do.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crime.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the storm

A more perfect union will start being born.

Let me know what you think! Here’s the initial rough take from February 4.

Good news from 2044?

Here’s the other new tune from me, spurred by a FAWM prompt to write a song about a time macine. I travel to the presidential election year of 2044 and muse on what it might be like of Sasha Obama and, yes, Barron Trump, were the candidates. (I doubt either will run but 2044 is the first year Barron Trump would be eligible.)

It’s called “Good News from 2044?” and is also still a work in progress, as you can clearly hear! The lyrics etc. are here. This is a 60-second snippet. The full song is on YouTube.

The world needs more “Fast Folk”

Most of my songs are not straight off the news. I am not remotely like the amazing songwriting machine Jesse Welles, who seems to pump out several topical tunes a week and has hand built a significant following.

But songwriting, for me, is an extension of my wider philosophy of using all possible skills and media when pursuing some goal. Given the state of the world, it’s been gratifying to get into this mode, which I call “fast folk,” drawing on a movement that began in and around New York City (and a couple other cities) from the early 1980s into the early 2000s. I see Welles as reviving this form, as I noted around the election.

In 1999, I wrote a New York Times feature about the Fast Folk movement centered on a core leader, Jack Hardy. Here’s my gift paywall-free link. ''The whole idea was to do it fast,'' Hardy explained to me. ''You could hear a song at an open mic or songwriters' meeting and two weeks later it was being played on the radio in Philadelphia or Chicago. It was urgent, exciting. It was in your face.''

Writers met each week in Hardy’s Greenwich Village walkup to test drive their latest compositions for peers. It was far more an acid bath than a soothing circle. Some heralded alumni include Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin. Steve Forbert, John Gorka, Lucy Kaplansky, and Christine Lavin.

The effort resulted in Fast Folk Musical Magazine and a series of recordings that ended up released by Smithsonian Folkways.

I hung out at Hardy’s sessions off and on, tossing in a song or two on occasion in the late 90s. But my tunes were a bit too literal and conventional to get big thumbs-up responses.

The more of this the better, and that’s why the annual FAWM monthlong songwriting slam is so great. There are thousands of participants, and the songs range across every possible genre and theme. Explore away!

Here’s Burr Settles describing this year’s FAWM push:

Given that I don’t have a day job now, financial support is appreciated if you can afford to help keep Sustain What going and open to all.

Here’s the podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with three authors of a sobering, and yet slightly hopeful, paper identifying a rising number of autocracies that are followed by a sharp social and political u-turn to democratization. A rough dynamic transcript is here. The paper is here:

The hopeful part of the open-access study is this:

The analysis presents a systematic empirical overview of patterns and developments of U-Turns [from autocracy toward democracy between 1900 and 2023]. A key finding is that 52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the last 30 years. The vast majority of U-Turns (90%) lead to restored or even improved levels of democracy.

But that has to be set against the trends tracked in the sobering annual reports of the V-Dem Institute (V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy), where four of the five study authors work. In our conversation, Staffan Lindberg, the Institute’s founding director, put it this way. Listen to him or read the statement below:

This is worse than in the 1930s moving into World War II. The number of countries, 42, at the same time moving back on democracy is higher than ever before. The share of the number of countries in the world is also higher than before. The share of the world population living in countries moving back on democracy is greater than ever before. It's unprecedented the strength of this wave of autocratization.

Insert 2/11/2025 - I’ve uploaded V-Dem’s brief summarizing the new study here:

Here are the core conclusions:

• Contemporary democracies are fairly resilient to the onset of autocratization: Since 1994, 54% have not experienced backsliding. Yet, democracies rarely survive if autocratization sets in [for more than a decade].• Breakdown does not prevent a return of democracy: Roughly 50% recover shortly after a democratic breakdown in a U-turn episode.• [Early], active, stiff, and coordinated resistance against autocratization from pro-democracy actors and institutions is key to making a U-turn.

Please explore V-Dem Institute’s annual reports and its graphing tool, which provides a dynamic view of country-by-country scoring on a variety of democracy “vital signs.” Here’s the United States, and you can see the effect of Trump’s first term on the indicators:

We discuss the underlying data, the analysis on u-turns toward democracy following autocratic surges, and - most important - the societal and governmental capacities that seem essential to foster such reversals.

Breaking norms

Lindberg explains how the simplicity and vagueness of the United States Constitution is both the source of the adaptability and resilience of American democracy but also a source of deep vulnerability facing extreme disruption. The country runs on norms as much as hard-edged rules, he says. And when a figure like Trump comes in, deadset on pushing norms to the breaking point, that spells trouble:

It's very easy to tear down democracy in the U .S. if the elites want to do it. There's a famous political scientist, Giovanni Sartori, who was at Columbia University for many, many years. He said once that the American democracy works not thanks to, but despite, the American Constitution. That's almost swearing in church in the U .S., right? And he said it works only as long as the Americans wanted to work. So that in these times, I think, that’s a critical aspect of democracy in the U .S. that one needs to keep thinking about.

Fabio Angiolillo, another author, explains how public resistance, including by people in key professional sectors like journalism, is essential, as is overcoming naive discounting of the risks of autocracy in countries that haven’t experienced it:

There’s much, much more and I hope you take time to listen. And do share this post.

There are more links and other resources in the “curtain raiser” post I published on Sunday:

Independent insights

Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote an excellent three-part brief on the erosion of American democracy in 2023. Part 3 was Democratic erosion: The role of executive aggrandizement.

Key points:

* Even a legitimately elected leader can undermine democracy if they consolidate power or use government resources to debilitate their political opposition.

* Election integrity is threatened if incumbents can weaponize the provision of government services or government jobs for partisan ends.

* Given the dysfunction in Congress and the current ideological makeup of the courts, there are reasons to worry about executive aggrandizement in the United States.

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Here's today’s Sustain What discussion with two journalists from Global Press, an international newsroom supporting female reporters in the world’s most troubled regions. Global Press immediately began widespread reporting on the realtime impacts of the initial USAID freeze and persistent chaos around money flowing to public health and other vital programs from Nepal to Uganda. (I apologize for some audio echo but you can scan the rough transcript as well.)

The editor-in-chief, Krista Karch, and Nakisanze Segawa, reporter-in-residence in Kampala, Uganda, offered disturbing descriptions of specific perils created by the Trump administration’s aggressive moves.

“People are dying”

As Karch says, “The big thing is that people are dying. People are dying. You cannot emphasize that any more.”

And of course please read Global Press’s reporting. Here are some of the latest dispatches:

* Zimbabwe Braces for HIV Resurgence as US Aid Evaporates - Sex workers are the first to feel the effects, as mobile health clinics that offered condoms and preventative treatments disappear.

* The Trump Administration Is Gutting USAID. Nepali Infants Will Starve, Officials Warn - The US government's abrupt stop-work order halts a 72-million-dollar project designed to end malnutrition. It’s worth noting that much of the Global Press output is published in local languages as well, as here in नेपाली.

* Without USAID Support, Refugees in Uganda Lose Food, Job Training -

Uganda hosts 1.8 million refugees and asylum-seekers, the largest number of any African country. But without US funding, basic services like food distribution are likely to end.

* Ebola Breaks Out in Uganda as US Halts Foreign Aid - At least one person has died in the country's latest outbreak. US aid has been key to containing previous outbreaks. How will Uganda fare without it?

Some critical comments and questions came in during the live show complaining that African nations should be more self sufficient and wean themselves from colonial support systems. Karch and Segawa said Global Press has stories in the works on that issue, which can also be seen percolating on social media in Uganada.

Finally we discussed the unique training and support system Global Press provides to empower and protect female journalists amid challenges that are intense even in the world’s wealthiest countries.

Segawa said:

Knowing Global Press has my back…gives me the courage to go to places that would rather be deemed dangerous for a female journalist to go to and talk to people and see what's happening and witness events and report about that.

Here’s yesterday’s “curtain raiser” post with more links and details:

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“Elon Musk can declare, properly, every Starship explosion as a step forward because you have to try lots of things until you see what works. You can't do that with commercial airlines.” - James Fallows

Here’s the webcast / podcast version of my Sustain What transportation conversation with longtime journalists James Fallows, David Kerley and Jim Motavalli. All the details and relevant links are in the “curtain raiser”:

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Fallows weighed in on just how extraordinarily safe U.S. commercial aviation has become because of a constant iterative push - particularly after crashes or close calls - to assess and improve. And how Trump and Musk’s blunt-instrument approach to policy and agency capacities will inevitably lead to tragedy.

As he explained, “Elon Musk can declare properly every starship explosion as a step forward because you have to try lots of things until you see what works. You can't do that with commercial airlines.”

This wasn’t all a thrashing. Clearly the Federal Aviation Administration needs modernization, including examinations of the role of artificial intelligence and other technologies Elon Musk, in particular, has pushed. Kerley and Fallows both talked about the need to jump start the lagging NextGen project (Next Generation Air Transportation System).

Here’s the FAA NextGen site and a video explainer:

Here’s Kerley on this stalled program:

If you have more questions, post them in the comment thread and I’ll forward them to Fallows, Kerley and/or Motavalli.

As the latest wave of food-tossing, media-seeking climate emergency protests began, I pulled together a spirited Sustain What discussion featuring the executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, which is pouring millions of dollars into edge-pushing protest networks, a longtime performance activist and two sociologists deeply researching when activism does and doesn’t matter.

My guests were the activism-focused sociologist Dana Fisher (@fisher_danar) of the University of Maryland along with the sociologist Robb Willer (@robbwiller) of Stanford University (an author of an important paper on the “activist’s dilemma”) and Margaret Klein Salamon (@climatepsych), executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, a top bankroller of soup tossers. We were also joined by longtime performance activist “Reverend” Billy Talen.

Sparks flew but civility ultimately ruled, and some important insights emerged. Here’s a rough transcript via Trint. If more folks choose a paying subscription, I can hire someone to help produce clean ones quickly.

To learn more and weigh in on the value and downsides of in-your-face activism, read my Sustain What post with details on this discussion.

This is the audio version of my Columbia Climate School Sustain What discussion of the world beyond 8 billion - focused on what factors in play today will determine the quality and quantity of human lives and the environment in the decades to come.

Read the text post here: As the Human Population Tops 8 Billion, a Look Beyond Bomb📈 and Crash 📉 Panic Proclamations.

Sift a rough transcript on Trint. If you become a financial supporter, you can help me hire an assistant to help with some of the production work.

The conversation centers on issues and options related to humanity topping the 8 billion mark in its developmental journey, as calculated by the United Nations. My guests dig in on the vital need to improve the prospects for girls, young women and migrants to shape more sustainable environmental and societal outcomes later in the century.

Guests:

Joe Chamie, a consulting demographer who is a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, "Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters." Read his Inter Press columns here, including his look at the 8 billion threshold and unsubstantiated forecasts of calamitous population implosion.

Céline Delacroix, director of the FPEarth.org project of the Population Institute and adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Health Sciences.Charles Kabiswa, executive director of Regenerate Africa, a nonprofit organization working to rebuild deteriorated social, ecological, health and economic systems to benefit people, nature and the climate across Africa.Terry McGovern, professor and chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and the director of the Program on Global Health Justice and Governance at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.Kathleen Mogelgaard, President and CEO of the Population Institute, an international non-profit organization that seeks to promote universal access to family planning information, education, and services. Read her recent opinion piece with William Ryerson in The Hill.

I’m posting some related thoughts in a separate dispatch and will add the link here.

I’m still eager to gauge how many of you prefer audio content to written output - and how best to integrate all of that in Sustain What. Please let me know what you do, and don’t want.

Yesterday I hosted a Columbia Climate School Sustain What conversation exploring what Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter means for the platform’s capacity to save lives in emergencies like extreme storms, floods, wildfires and other environmental emergencies.

My featured guest was Jim Moffitt (@snowman), who worked in developer relations at Twitter for eight years building the capacity for the platform’s vast trove of real-time data - generated through the flow of thousands of tweets a second around the world - to be harnessed by companies, journalists, researchers or government agencies through its APIs - application programming interfaces.

His prime focus, before and during his time at the company, was improving monitoring and response to extreme weather events. (He was at a smaller firm, Gnip, in Boulder, Corado, that was acquired by Twitter in 2014.)

In a tweet on November 21, Daniel K. Pearson, who runs efforts to modernize U.S. Geological Survey water management services, described just one of myriad applications of Twitter data that protect the public:

We run two real-time flood and rain accounts for @USGS on Twitter. @USGS_TexasFlood and @USGS_TexasRain are both at risk. They have been providing updates to the public since the devastating Memorial Day floods in 2015, and thru Harvey… a testament to this tech. #TwitterForGood

Moffitt quit Twitter on November 18th amid the upheaval and deep cuts initiated by Musk, but has not remotely given up on the platform’s potential to build resilience in communities around the world. In our conversation, Moffitt said he does not see any alternatives emerging any time soon.

Joining the discussion was Andrea Thompson (@AndreaTWeather), the sustainability editor at Scientific American. Andrea has been covering implications of the Twitter upheaval for emergency management. Read her latest story here: Twitter Chaos Endangers Public Safety, Emergency Managers Warn.

Moffitt hopes one point registers with Musk before he does any more damage: The capacity of Twitter’s open APIs to integrate the platform’s massive realtime data flows with apps or analysis that can save lives also makes the company money:

It's public information, as being a formerly public company, that these end points drive, through partnerships we have with all kinds of different companies, of all different sizes nearly $400 million a year in revenue.

It's not ad revenue and it's only 10 to 15 percent of Twitter's revenue at the time. But it's very stable. It's driven by multi-year contracts. In a recession, it's not going to be affected by advertising spending going down. Our job was to go out and and work with other developers of all kinds, from academics to engineering teams at some of the biggest partners we have. But again, without that engineering engine, it was unclear to me if I would have new things to talk about.

Twitter’s heart is its people

The “engineering engine” Moffitt described is people - a companywide network of coders and information architects and others that has been deeply damaged by Musk’s abrupt staff cuts.

[Insert - Joe Bak-Coleman, an associate research scientist at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at the Columbia School of Journalism, wrote an excellent Scientific American article explaining how Musk’s creditable approach to building a rocket business is a bad fit for an information business.]

Moffitt said his team (most, like him, based in Boulder) had been working hard to advance an ever-widening array of ways for companies, scholars and scientists, and government agencies, to exploit the data Twitter use generates second by second in unfolding events like floods or storms. With Musk’s arrival, there was the prospect for some positive outcomes, he said:

Part of me was excited about, okay, we have a new management, new ownership. They seem to have a science bent. Maybe there is going to be a room here for building more things into Twitter that would make the public's use of Twitter during emergencies even easier.

But the drastic staff cuts excised the capacity to sustain this flow of new relationships and businesses. When I asked why he quit, Moffitt gave this answer:

I hope it doesn't sound cheesy, but my eight-year tenure at Twitter was really all about my colleagues and the team we have here in Boulder…. You know, I learned that of all the engineering teams that drive the features, the products, the API, the endpoints that my team supports, about 85 percent were let go in that first round. And so it's just sort of writing on the wall that without those teams building the things that I go out and talk about, that I sit down and document, that I wasn't sure of the future I would have or my team would have in that type of environment. That's really the main reason.

Nothing like Twitter

Andrea Thompson said that people working in a wide range of positions in emergency preparedness and response had a uniform sense of concern:

Every every one I talked to said, you know, there is nothing like Twitter. It is it has become, for better or worse, integrated into the way we communicate with the public in these situations.

Moffitt added that there’s still enormous potential for this capacity of Twitter to be employed at every level of government [I’ve streamlined the language here a bit]:

A small emergency management office in some county somewhere could work with partners that made their software platforms available at nonprofit-type pricing. I always kind of joke, if you hired a computer science intern for a summer, at the end of that summer, they could have built you a really useful tool for not only listening for local tweets of interest, but for automating whatever software you're using for your monitoring system.

I was planning on setting up a sort of hands-on coding workshop where you bring the computer language of your choice. And we'll sit down and and show the basics of these two things, the listening side and the publishing side. So maybe there's opportunities to still do that down the road. I do think the Twitter API was very accessible. It was free to academics. It was free as long as you're not pulling in more than a half a million tweets a month, which for a local area would be an extremely amount of tweets around any flooding or hurricanes. So we had a lot of unique characteristics that really is a low barrier to entry

I said I’d be happy to explore how my communication initiative at Columbia might help.

A key to Twitter’s unique value and growth, he said, remains the open interfaces that allow users to seek patterns in the flow and put them to use.

I can't believe the APIs themselves would be let go. Again, they drive some significant revenue and they really help expand the reach of Twitter. With this toolkit, you can build all kinds of amazing things…. The use cases are endless, and these APIs just represent the basic building blocks of building these types of things. What I love about Twitter is, whatever interest you have or community you want to build, you know, it can be a really useful tool. Mine was flood warning. I jumped in and was like, oh, of course Twitter is a tool for this.

We explored whether any tool might emerge that has this global-to-local sensory-system capacity and is insulated from the whims of a billionaire owner. Having written about the metaphor of cathedral building in pondering sustainability, I offered a quirky thought, noting that Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame has poked into the social media arena with WT Social (Wiki Tribune Social). Listen here and tell me what you think:

You listen as a podcast or watch this Columbia Climate School Sustain What conversation here: Can the Public Value of Twitter be Sustained There or Replicated Elsewhere?

There’s a rough Trint transcription of our conversation here. If more folks choose a paid subscription to Sustain What, I can ponder hiring someone to turn around smooth transcripts!

To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

There’s lots more background, including links Moffitt assembled to an amazing set of posts on Twitter’s use in emergencies, in my previous post here:

For audio podcast fans

This is the audio of a webinar I just held for Columbia Climate School colleagues eager to sift for strategies making the most of online connectivity amid epic shifts, including Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. My internal work here at Columbia is focused on building science and policy communication pathways that are about more than clicks. The slides are posted here.

My earlier post has the rough transcript (also on Trint here), with links to relevant info added:

As thousands of propaganda-inflamed supporters of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro violently invaded the top offices of government in Brasilia today, I couldn’t help thinking back to the four months I spent in Brazil in 1989, the year the nation was in the midst of its first direct presidential elections since 1960.

It was heartening to track reports tonight that this insurrectionist tide had been turned back by police. But no one who cares about democracy, Indigenous rights or environmental protection should rest easy.

Most of my time in Brazil 34 years ago was spent roaming the Amazon rain forest, researching the life, assassination and legacy of Chico Mendes for my first book, The Burning Season. Mendes, raised in the forest, was a rubber-tree tapper and union organizer who became an international figure leading efforts to stem a rising tide of deforestation and violence driven by largely-lawless cattle ranching and developers. He was killed on December 22, 1988, by a shotgun blast fired by the son of a rancher enraged by the success of the rubber tapers’ nonviolent blockades of chainsaw crews and court victories.

Mendes, like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,, was a socialist and the campaign to save the forest, then as now, was seen by patriotic “ruralistas” as an assault on the national imperative to develop roadless, resource-rich frontiers.

The Mendes case led to changes in Brazilian law and rain forest governance that cut the murder rate on the country’s farflung resource frontiers and reduced what had been a far more dramatic surge in forest destruction that anything in recent years.

Conflicting visions of the Amazon frontier

But Brazilians still have two starkly different visions of what the vast Amazon region should be — with forest dwellers and environmentally-attuned urbanites siding with international conservationists, but many others seeing an undeveloped territory needing taming and exploitation. Bolsonaro’s “beef, Bible, bullet” appeal to rural Brazilians largely played on the latter sentiment.

In my book, I propsed that the Amazon is to most Brazilians what Alaska is to lower-48 Americans — a distant abstraction tuned to fit one’s personal politics.

Among his first acts in his new term in office, Lula issued decrees aimed at curbing mining in Indigenous reserves and deforestation in Amazonia and the Cerrado region. As Mongabay reported, he also created a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples as one step to fulfill a campaign plege “to combat 500 years of inequality.”

But gains won long ago through peaceful resistance and blood, and now through Lula’s acts, remain fragile.

As André Schröder reported for Mongabay in November, “Bolsonaro won in the majority of the 256 municipalities in the Arc of Deforestation, which accounts for about 75 percent of the deforestation in the Amazon, as well as in Novo Progresso, in Pará, where ranchers, loggers and land-grabbers orchestrated a significant burning of deforested areas in 2019.”

Economic realities in the Amazon still favor ranching over rubber, as a recent Associated Press story datelined in Mendes’s home town attests. The story charts the allure of livestock even within the protected reserve named for Mendes. That widespread appeal of cattle as a cash reserve was conveyed to me by one rancher this way during my reporting in 1989: “Scratch the skin of a rubber tapper and you’ll find a rancher.”

When The Burning Season was published in 1990, I made the rounds of TV and radio shows. Here was my interview with Today Show host Deborah Norville. I brought along one of the rubber shoes tappers made from the latex they harvested. (Some residents of Acre, the state where Mendes lived and died, have built businesses making and selling modern lines of latex shoes.)

But one interview stood out – my hourlong conversation with the legendary historian, labor champion and radio host Studs Terkel. I won’t add a transcript of our chat becuase you really can’t appreciate these conversations without hearing Terkel’s melliflluous voice and feeling the intensity of his focus.

Chicago’s WFMT Radio Network and the Chicago History Museum have posted an archive of hundreds of Terkel’s four and a half decades of interviews. (The Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities supported the effort.)

The full archive is at studsterkel.org. Sift by theme. For the environment, you’ll find conservation leaders like Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough and the writers Barry Lopez and Alexander Cockburn (also on the Amazon). But you’ll also hear from workers unprotected by a union describing woeful conditions at a Hanes shirt factory.

I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did halfway back through my 66 years.

I also encourage you to listen to the magical converastion on life, faith and death that took place in 2004 when On Being host Krista Tippett turned the tables and interviewed Terkel near the end of his extraordinary life.