Episodes
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This new talk is the latest iteration of what Iāve learned and unlearned through 40 years of reporting and conversation wrangling around the intertwined challenges of building a safer human relationship with the climate system and with energy.
My focus, echoing my goals in these dispatches, was conveying how to get beyond amorphous labels like sustainability and climate emergency by asking productive questions, starting with āSustain what?ā
Watch or listen above and share this post, or watch and share on YouTube:
I gave the talk for the Jay Heritage Center, a nonprofit group on a historic estate once owned by John Jay, one of Americaās Founding Fathers and its first Supreme Court Chief Justice. The estate is a refuge for people and wildlife tucked between the busy 1-95 corridor through Westchester County, N.Y., and Long Island Sound. The center is working to make the park into what it calls an āeducational campus, hosting innovative and inclusive programs about American history, historic preservation, social justice, and environmental stewardship.ā
In a story for the Rye Record, reporter Jacqui Wilmot nicely summarized my core point:
While early climate reporting focused on the science and data, he said, he came to recognize the need to go beyond the numbers and engage communities in dialogue. He seeks out conversations that transcend political divides, looking to find common ground and practical ways forward on climate changeā¦.
āHow do you manage a complexity monster like climate change?ā Revkin asked. āYou break it into parts. Shouting āclimate emergencyā is vague for most people, unless you can break it down into actionable steps. Moving beyond traditional storytelling means encouraging productive conversations and empowering communities to act, adapt, and build resilience together.ā
Please watch and weigh in - and share this post of course to grow our community and help others learn how to tame, if not defeat, the climate ācomplexity monster.ā
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Take a mental break and do tell me how you stay sane and centered given the turbulence of this political and societal moment and the tough path ahead?
For me - along with our dogs, cooking, carpentry, hikes and the like - thereās always music. (Read my post explainng that side of my life if you havenāt already.)
This new song of mine, āAfter the Roaming,ā was inspired by a melody composed by fellow student Kathy O'Rourke during our current songwriting workshop at Bagaduce Music in Blue Hill, Maine. (We were each tasked by the teacher, George Emlen, to create a couple of simple melodies and then were asked the following week to write lyrics to a melody other than our own.)
The lyrics are below.
Lifeās a very fine line right now
Iām planning to pull together this tune and a batch of my recent original songs into my first album since my debut recording in 2013, āA Very Fine Line.ā That tune, I realize, is also highly relevant given that one line is as follows:
Itās a very fine line between loony and sane.A very fine line between a loss and a gain.A very fine line between pleasure and pain.Most of your life you spend walking a very fine line.People you think are a genius are this far from bent.President blows an election by half a percent.We all know love hurts but we try it again and again.We know that the line between love and despair is so thin.
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Hereās āAfter the Roaming.ā Snag an audio download at Revkin.Bandcamp.com or share the video version on YouTube below.
After the Roaming
Ā© 2024, Andrew Revkin
Iāve fished the ocean, and Iāve plowed the ground.
Iāve toppled timber and rambled around.
But in all my roaming, two things I canāt find:
A loving companion and true peace of mind.
A loving companion and true peace of mind.
When a lad leaves his home to go out on his own
His work and his friends are his life.
But the job and the beer in the end bring no cheer
Compared to the arms of a wife.
So Iāll sell my boat, drop the plow and the axe.
Iāll woo a sweet woman and finally relax.
After all of that roaming, two things will be mine:
A loving companion and true piece of mind.
A loving companion and true piece of mind.
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UPDATED 10/28 9 am - As Iāve written before, no real progress on the issues I explore here on Sustain What is possible without sustaining democracy and moving past racism and hate, so I had to cover tonightās hate-filled Trump ārally.ā
As Donald Trumpās Madison Square Garden event was getting into gear on Sunday afternoon, I reached out to Marshall Curry, an Academy-Award winning film director.
I was hoping to interview him because in 2017 he made a stunning seven-minute documentary called āA Night at the Gardenā built with rediscovered film footage of the February 1939 rally at the venue organized by the German American Bund, a pro-Hitler organization that was inflaming passions here in the years before the United States entered World War II.
It turned out Curry was in line outside the Garden amid thousands of MAGA-hatted Trump fans.
Curry was there shooting a documentary following the work of a major magazine that had two journalists in the hall (details canāt be released yet). Once he was in the building, in between hate-filled speeches from the podium, we were able to connect by phone. Iāve posted the conversation above and you can also watch and share it on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter.
I got to know Curry starting in 2011, when I wrote for The New York Times about his ābrutally neutralā film (my description) centered on the life of an Earth Liberation Front arsonist environmentalist and the federal prosecutor who pursued the group for years.
In our conversation Curry stresses that he doesnāt see Trump as a Nazi, but did find the level of vitriol in the hall deeply chilling - and at a level far beyond what heās seen in even the most passionately anti-Trump Democrats.
As he expalined:
I still donāt think Trump is a Nazi but I do think heās a demagogue and I do think he uses a lot of these same tactics demagogues have used for thousands of years ā to kind of stir people up against each other and grab power in the process.
Please do listen and weigh in with your thoughts.
I watched the first hour or so of warmup acts and was appalled at several points, particularly by Rudolph W. Giulianiās vile diatribe lumping all Palestinians - including the āgood peopleā - in one unwelcome boat.
I hope that any voters in swing states whose prime concern is the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people drop any plans to skip voting for Kamala Harris.
In the meantime, Fox News had a very different impression of the āhistoric rally.ā
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This is the podcast version of my Sustain What show on an illuminating Washington Post story on issues and insights around the newsmaking and much-cited ābillion-dollar weather and climate disastersā assessments by NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Iāve been deeply impressed with Harry Stevensā reporting on climate at the Washington Post in his Climate Lab columns. Heās outdone himself with a big new analysis of the insights and issues around the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationās much-covered tally of ābillion dollar weather and climate disastersā from extreme climate events. Gift link: http://wapo.st/3YiJgaz. The key takeaways are:
* The tracking project is valuable but there are lots of important questions about how the disasters are measured and compiled.
* Frequent efforts by elected officials, activists and climate-centric journalists to use the surge in billion-dollar disasters as evidence of human-driven climate change have no solid basis in data.
We were joined by Jessica Weinkle, a researcher at the interface of climate and society at the University of North Carolina, Wilmigton. Sheās writing up a storm on Substack on her Conflicted dispatch and on Breakthrough Journal. In a recent Breakthrough Institute post on the expanding bullās eye of vulnerable development in coastal North Carolina, she included just one of countless visuals demonstrating that humans are worsening climate risk far faster on the ground than they are through the heat-trapping influence of greenhouse gases on the global climate:
Please watch or listen here and share our discussion on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or the recorded stream on X at @revkin.
Hereās the ācurtain raiserā post from this morning:
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Hereās the podcast version of my āWatchwordsā conversation with Mekala Krishnan, the lead author of a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, āThe hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition.ā I use the term watchwords to highlight terms or phrases that too often confuse more than clarify.
We were joined halfway through by Jessica Lovering, the co-founder and exective director of Good Energy Collective, which has a its mission ābuilding the progressive case for nuclear energy as an essential part of the broader climate change agenda and working to align the clean energy space with environmental justice and sustainability goals.ā
My curtain-raiser post has other ways to watch and share it:
Julio Friedmann, a friend and past colleague (at Columbia), has also written a fine post on this study and his own analysis. As he writes, thereās āa reluctance by many to confront the realities of The Hard Stuff: the parts of The Work that are costly, challenging, poorly framed, and utterly necessary.ā
Hereās the Scale Monster image I deploy on social media off and on. Free free to share it!
As you likely know, this dispatch and webcast are mostly a labor of love now - but it is labor. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
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First, hereās my freshly updated post offering a heap of ways anyone anywhere can help the organizations and volunteers working nonstop around Hurricane Helene devastation zones:
Second, hereās a shoutout to the professional and volunteer first responders doing highly dangerous work seeking and rescuing survivors. Several are among the more than 215 victims so far. The North Carolina National Guard has been working nonstop.
Finally, please watch or listen to my Sustain What conversation seeking lessons from the catastrophic inland flooding triggered when Hurricane Helene's remnants collided with the Appalachian Mountains. My guest is David McConville, a data visualizer and risk communicator (his company is Spherical Studio) who grew up in the regions hammered by Helene and lived and worked in Asheville for many years trying to use technology, including a visualization dome, to convey the flood threat in the steep hills and deep hollows there. I got to know McConville after meeting him in Asheville when I spoke at wonderful Warren Wilson College there. We bumped into each other off and on in our separte, but related, journeys trying to figure out how to use media to foster sustainable human journeys.
As the catastrophic scope of the historic flooding in the region emerged last weekend, McConville said this on Facebook:
My heart is breaking today for many close friends in Asheville and western North Carolina, where I lived for over 20 years.
Iām also feeling an eerie sense of dĆ©jĆ vu. The catastrophic flooding of Hurricane Frances in 2004 got me interested in visualizing the dynamics of watersheds, impervious surfaces, and property development within bioregions.
I created the visualization below 15 years ago with The Elumenati and collaborators to help policymakers better grasp these dynamics and their consequences. Eerily, it features simulations of flooding in Biltmore Village, the real-world versions of which are currently all over the news.
He continued:
āSpherical is continuing this work in Los Angeles with Andy Lipkis, whose work on urban resilience was similarly catalyzed by his experience with flash floods in LA. As Daniel Swain notes, the looming threat of California's next ARKStorm bears striking parallels to what southern Appalachia is currently facing:
If youāve been following me for awhile you already know about the history and future of extreme atmospheric rivers, with a repeat of the 1861-2 event that created an inland sea inevitable, if its timing remains uncertain. But hereās an excerpt from, and link to, climate and weather scientist Swainās great thread and hereās a post of his from 2022 on this threat, amplified by human-caused global warming.
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The wider picture of disaster amnesia
In the webcast McConville and I talk about the challenges in trying to get communities like Asheville to act on data showing profound, but rare, hazards. Itās not easy.
In our chat he notes such warnings can end up just as ignored as Japanās ancient, moss-encrusted ātsunami stonesā were as generations forgot the warnings of ancestors who carved phrases like this into large tablets set on hillsides above the reach of great rare waves:
High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendantsā¦. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.
This is something I wrote about back in 2011:
I did a highly relevant Sustain What conversation some months back with Daniel Starosta, who studies the art, music, and history produced in the wake of disasters to better understand the social dynamics that can either impede or boost preparedness facing future threats.
Starostaās research has spanned the landscape of disaster from hurricanes in Florida to tsunamis in Japan. He also works in climate adaptation and disaster resilience planning, with experience from Puerto Rico to Hawai'i to Bhutan. Hereās that conversation:
Exploring Disasters, Culture, Forgetfulness and Preparedness
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Even as Ohioās Republican Governor Mike DeWine has defended the vast majority of the stateās Haitian population, while recognizing serious issues related to the surge of newcomers, Donald Trumpās vice presidential candidate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has double downed on his calls to āfellow patriotsā to ākeep the cat memes flowingā - 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 āstop the stealā 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. Hereās 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 āgoodā 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 Trumpās nonstop lies and this required new approaches to reporting and presenting the news. Hereās that snippet from Jay, in which he said, āI think weāre facing the biggest propaganda moment in modern U.S. history.ā
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 falsehoodā¦actually goes way, way back. That's not a new technique eitherā¦. 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.
Thereās a (very) rough searchable transcript here. Transcripts can be smoothed out if more of my subscribers chip in financially.
I hope youāll consider becoming a paid subscriber to help sustain my work and keep this content open for those who canāt afford to pay.
And please explore Hobbsās fantastic array of open learning resources! Thereās a whole section on āmeme politics.ā Thereās a crowd-sourced ārate this propagandaā gallery.
Hereās 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 itās 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. Itās no secret that I really hate much of Elon Muskās 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 diverās 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 Muskās 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, āElon 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.ā
My concerns echo those of David Nemer, as described in a New York Times story on the showdown by Jack Nicas and Kate Conger:
āI was someone who was very on [Moraeseās] side,ā said David Nemer, a Brazilian-born media professor who has studied his nationās approach to disinformation at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
āBut when we saw the X decision, we were like: āWhat the hell? This is too much,āā he said, using an expletiveā¦. Justice Moraes has āset up a state of exception,ā Mr. Nemer said. āBut itās a permanent state of exception, and thatās not good for any sort of democracy.ā
If you read me regularly youāll know that āstate of exceptionā 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 āclimate emergency.ā 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:
Brazilās yearslong fight against the internetās 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 citizensā 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 countryās 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 Metaās WhatsApp, the nationās most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 due to the companyās 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 authoritiesā 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 ā 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 āTwitter revolution,ā but it has since been restored.
Beware ādigital authoritarianismā
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. Iāve posted our chat at the top of this dispatch and hope youāll give a listen. No one knows the issues better. A decade ago, Madory was described by the Washington Post as āThe Man Who Can See the Internet.ā
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. Hereās what one such shutdown looked like in Cuba in 2022:
Also read this Conversation post: Internet shutdowns: hereās how governments do it, by Lisa Garbe, a postdoctoral research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
Of course in all of this, itās 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.
Hereās a parting shot from Rio de Janeiro:
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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. Hereās 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 Kelnerās 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):
Hereās a bit of Kelnerās own portfolio from her About page:
As you know if youāve been tracking my output for awhile, thereās still very little data pointing to behavioral impacts of climate visualizations - even for compelling efforts like Ed Hawkinsā āwarming stripesā. 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. Thatās true even for bullet-grazed Trump.
As I tweeted yesterday, the momentous shooting in Pennsylvania can lead to āeither 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.ā
Is this a tipping point or navigable pinch point?
Trumpās base is going nowhere. Given that the party conventions mark the start of the general election campaign, itās 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:
āThe speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdingerā¦ Had this not happened, this wouldāve been one of the most incredible speechesā aimed mostly at the policies of President Joe Biden. āHonestly, itās going to be a whole different speech now.ā
At the same time, of course, a legion of Republicans jumped on the shooting to intensify āus/themā attacks on Democrats, so weāll see how that goesā¦
But thereās a role here for everyone, at every level, to choose how to frame conversations and messages. With that in mind Iām 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, āThe Way Out - How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.ā
Coleman holds a joint appointment at Teachers College and the Earth Institute and directs two research centers. He is also the author of āMaking Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreementā (2014) and āThe Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflictsā (2011), among other books.
He says āThe Way Out - How to Overcome Toxic Polarization,ā is āabout 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.ā
* 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. Heāll 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, āOn Solid Ground,ā as a ācall for personal and national grounding in the explosion of racial and civil unrest and the growing worldwide death spiral that was 2020.ā Please also check out Harrisās new memoir, āSearching for Solid Ground.ā
Hereās 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, āMental 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 āHigh Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.ā Hereās Ripleyās summary of this concept: āWhen we are baffled by the insanity of the āother sideāāin our politics, at work, or at homeāitās because we arenāt seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. Thatās what āhigh conflictā does. People do escape high conflict. Individualsāeven entire communitiesācan 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.ā
* 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 Harrisās. His lineage goes back to a slave holder, Williams Carter Wickham, who was among those whose statues were being removed across the South. (Thereās a fantastic New York Times story about the Wickhams.)
Finally, hereās a magical Sustain What 2022 conversation on āpeace speech,ā centering on the experience and skills built through PĆ”draig Ć Tuamaās many years as a mediator, gay rights voice, theologian and poet on the front lines during Irelandās ātroubles.ā
PĆ”draig Ć 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 OāGarden ā a poet, educator and author, most recently, of the book of essays āGlad to Be Humanā (and a friend).
At the time, Ć Tuama was in residence at Columbia University working with Colemanās "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 Ć 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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Hereās a key point I made in todayās pop-up webcast:
Think of Tornado Alley as a syndrome, not a place. And it isnāt what, and where, it used to be.
In 2018, longtime tornado researchers Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University and Harold Brooks of NOAAās 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 āChanges in tornado risk and societal vulnerability leading to greater tornado impact potential.ā The authors are Stephen M. Strader of Villanova University, Victor Gensini, Walker S. Ashley and graduate student Amanda N. Wagner of Villanova.
Hereās 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. Heās been an all-too-frequent presence in my webcasts on the āexpanding bullās eyeā 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 harmās way, as in this paper.
I hope youāll 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.
Hereās an earlier Sustain What discussion on this point:
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I hope youāll 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 ā What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesnāt, 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, whoās joining the Hoover Institution this fall as a senior fellow, has a new op-ed out in the Wall Street Journal titled āThe āClimate Crisisā Fades Out.ā 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 āunsettled/settledā 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 youāve seen here before. Read Pielkeās critique of Kooninās book (which largely tracks my views):
Pielke also debated Koonin last year on the question, āIs Net Zero by 2050 Possible?ā We revisited this criticism of the book taken from that debate:
Kooninās 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 Putinās full-scale invasion played out in 2022.
That is what youāll experience when the documentary āCheckpoint Zooā gets into theaters or streaming sites after its premiere at the Tribeca Festival. I hope the film gets wide distribution.
āCheckpoint Zooā tells the story of Feldman Ecopark, a sprawling zoo and wildlife sanctuary on the outskirts of Ukraineās second biggest city, Karkhiv, just 30 miles from the Russian border. The facility was created in 2011 by Oleksandr Feldman, one of Ukraineās 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, itās 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. Hereās 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 youāll take time to watch or listen to my Sustain What conversation with Zeman. (Hereās the super rough Trint transcript.) I got to know know and respect his work through his previous documentary, āThe Loneliest Whale.ā 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 thereās a trailer or clip from āCheckpoint Zooā online Iāll 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 NOAAās National Hurricane Center tracking and warning site. Donāt 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 NOAAās 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. Itās 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.
Iāve 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 whatās 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 āCategory 6ā 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.
Thereās 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 Andrewās 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, whoās 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. Thereās more about Clynk below.
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Nichols, whoās featured in Humesā book, was a prime force shaping the successful 2021 effort to expand Maineās āExtended Producer Responsibilityā (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 arenāt always the enemy, pointing to the leadership of one of Maineās largest craft beer producers, Allagash Brewing Company. Read Allagashās page extolling the virtues of EPR.
Every town needs a change-making āMargeā
I love how this section of Humesā book on Nichols echoes what Jigar Shah, who leads the Biden administrationās 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 Nicholsā 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:
Hereās a video primer on Clynkās innovative approach to beverage container redemption:
Related Sustain What posts and episodes:
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Iāve spent a lot of time assessing ways to defeat what I call the ācomplexity monsterā impeding climate and energy solutions. Hereās 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. (Hereās 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 āEmbracing our Emergency,ā is being led later this spring by the progressive Emmy-winning filmmaker Josh Fox, best known for his HBO documentary āGasland,ā and the wide-ranging author and convener Daniel Pinchbeck.
As Fox and Pinchbeck explain in our chat, theyāre 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 todayās polycrisis. There are 10 live sessions between April 28 and May 29. You can learn more and register here. Thereās 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 thereās an excerpt below, along with a link to a free guide to āSeven Essential Tools For Surviving - and Thriving - in a Time of Climate Crisis.āš
Some of the resulting funds from the seminars will go to helping Fox finish his latest film, āThe Welcome Table,ā 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 āwelcome tableā is far more likely to foster thriving in the United States and elsewhere than building walls.
I reached Fox in New Orleans, where heās preparing for the filmās 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, āThe Unrestrictied Dumping-Ground,ā which depicts Uncle Sam overwhelmed by waves of ratlike Italian immigrants. Hereās 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. Itās our benefit to celebrate culture rather than ostracize and criminalize. And if we havenāt learned this lesson by now we donāt know what America is.
I couldnāt agree more.
From the great clips Iāve seen, the film is coming together in Foxās inimitable and creative style, meshing music, events and other arts with gripping footage and his wry wit. Iāll do more on the film later this year. Hereās 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 couldnāt 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.
Hereās Daniel Pinchbeckās 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 ābusiness as usualā 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.)
Letās consider another option: Temperatures will rise several degrees in the next decades leading to intensifying catastrophes. Even so, the world wonāt 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. Hereās 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!
Iām 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 āPredatory Delayā on Climate? Snap Forward with Alex Steffen
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šŗ š§ 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
* AngĆ©lica Mendes, Chico Mendesās granddaughter, who has a biology Ph.D. and is president of ComitĆŖ Chico Mendes
Why should anyone outside of the region pay attention to the reemergence of Darci Alves Pereira as āPastor Danielā in MedicilĆ¢ndia, a remote Amazonian town of only 30,000 people? This incident is a tiny window on a big and worrisome reality in Brazil.
Thereās been enormous progress stanching fires and forest clearing since the election of Luiz InĆ”cio āLulaā da Silva, but the rural right-wing and evangelical movements supporting former Presiden Jair Bolsonaro still have substantial power and Lulaās 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 donāt already and share this post with others.
Read the companion post for lots more:
Hereās some of my election coverage and hereās 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.)
Hereās MedicilĆ¢ndia.
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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.
Sheās 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). Sheās also caught between edge-pushing data distorters or disbelievers proclaiming either doom or scam. Itās not a fun position to occupy.
I hope youāll subscribe to, or share, Ritchieās fine Substack dispatchSustainability by numbers! Hereās 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 āqualitative dataā - the meat and potatoes of social science (think of studies done by interviewing hundreds of people in a field or in a plight).
They donāt, 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 youāll check it out when you have time. Hereās a core moment with Schipper, a researcher long focused on societal factors that boost or reduce climate vulnerability.
Hereās the rest (viewing links and background): āCovering Climate Where Data are Scant and Beliefs Run Hot.ā
Program note: On Tuesday, March 5th, at 2 p.m. ET, join me to explore whatās known about climate activistsā impacts on climate policy, from fossil-fueled backlash to the role of a āradical flankā 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 ā From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.
Also read Fisherās recent Nature commentary (with two coauthors): āHow effective are climate protests at swaying policy ā and what could make a difference?ā
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 āwe donāt knowā downward to sobering realities like ācultural cognitionā (our hunan habit of seeing the same data through divergent cultural filters).
Hereās 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.ā
I recorded this conversation a couple of years ago, but never aired it. Pahlās insights and ideas remain as fresh as ever.
Please share this post with others. Iāve 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 āwarming stripesā of British climlate scientist Ed Hawkins: āExploring Climate Visualization Frontiers on #ShareYourStripes Dayā
The stripes have gotten heaps of attention (Iāve 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.
Itās important not to be swept away by the coolness factor with communication innovation. But itās also vital to keep pushing communication frontiers.
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Hereās 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 canāt 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. Hereās 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
Hereās 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 Pewās Protecting Antarcticaās Southern Ocean project, which focuses on conserving an area that encompasses 10% of the worldās 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. Hereās a Pew video on the role of krill in the Antarctic ācarbon conveyer beltā:
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; Iād changed the recording date and didnāt 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 organizationās 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 ā boomā as catches are capped at 620 000 MT until CCAMLR based on scientific information decides otherwise. āKrill fishery increasing back towards the level of the mid 1980āsā 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 worldsā 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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