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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.
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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:
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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 .
As Fox and Pinchbeck explain in our chat, they’re convening an array of guests, from 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.
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 . 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
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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📺 🎧 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 hope you'll watch, share and weigh in on this invaluable Sustain What conversation I just had with , 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 dispatch! 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.
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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.
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):
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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.
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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).
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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 with the or on , prolific deep divers like on and climate-campaigning media innovators like and prolific data-centered analysts like , (A World of 8 Billion) and . The self-described disasterologist 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:
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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.; , the writer of the refreshing Substack newsletter ; 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.
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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.
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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:
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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.”
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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…
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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.
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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:
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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!
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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)
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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."
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe - Visa fler
