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Even as Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine has defended the vast majority of the state’s Haitian population, while recognizing serious issues related to the surge of newcomers, Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has double downed on his calls to “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing” - stoking sufficient fear and hatred in pursuit of the White House that bomb threats continue and racist Proud Boys have reportedly showed up in Springfield. And Haitian residents are living in fear.
With all of this in mind, I thought it worth highlighting a Sustain What conversation I had in December 2020, as then-President Trump pushed his “stop the steal” election lies and laid the foundation for the January 6 insurrection. My guest was University of Rhode Island communications professor Renee Hobbs, who teaches propaganda literacy, is the author of a fantastic guide book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age, and has built a priceless suite of online learning tools to explore and share. Here’s a book excerpt!
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.
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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
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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:
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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:
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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
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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 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.
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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.
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):
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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).
~ ~
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:
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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.; 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.
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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.”
Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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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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