Sustain What?

I hope you’ll take time to watch and share this Sustain What conversation with Cory Doctorow , a tireless champion of the best that digital technology can give society and foe of those who are enshitifying this public good for profit or power. Also please pass it around on Facebook , YouTube , LinkedIn and X/Twitter . And do subscribe to Sustain What and consider chipping in if you like what I’m d...

If you missed my advance post on my Sustain What conversation with Laura Grego, a longtime analyst of nuclear war risks, strategies and technologies, here’s your chance to watch and weigh in over the weekend. There’s little here that is reassuring. Grego, drawing on two decades of deep diving, says: I would argue that I think things are about as dangerous as they’ve ever been – at least since the...

I just had such a great Sunday Sanity conversation with the activist folk dynamos Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer . Just watch and enjoy. And share! If you want to learn “No Kings Here,” the song Fink co-wrote with Tom Paxton, here’s their breakdown of the chords: The back story is in yesterday’s post here: Thank you Michael Ludgate , Peter van Soest , and many others for tuning into my live video! Jo...

Insert, June 4, 2026: Here’s the guitar-vocal version of “Life is a Band” from my new album, Wake Me up Martha . Here’s my somg about the power of community - musical or otherwise. Most folks here know I’ve been a performing songwriter in the background behind my journalism for decades . Music is a fine counterpoint to reporting - giving me the ability to tackle issues, observations and questions...

This is the podcast post for my special September 28th Sunday Sanity conversation with my friend Dar Williams. Here’s the updated “curtain raiser’ post with all the background on our chat and Williams’ first album on Righteous Babe Records, Hummingbird Highway: Thank you Dave Finnigan , Bart Ziegler , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is...

Boy this was a bracing, high-velocity and fun discussion with longtime renewable-energy analyst and evangelist Joe Romm. If you missed it live, now’s your chance to listen or skim the transcript and post questions or reactions. We explored a heap of issues related to climate, energy and online communication. We went back in time to our Dot Earth and Climate Progress tussles and moments of agreemen...

I hope you’ll watch and share this fresh and fascinating discussion of a project hosted at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at fostering “adversarial collaboration” when researchers - as just one example - clash in the literature over data that could reveal why humans tend to hold fast to certain beliefs and when and how they update them. I can’t imagine a more important question these days. M...

The death of John Prine early in the early weeks of the pandemic was a wrenching blow for his many fans among both audiences and fellow musicians. As I wrote in the weekend curtain raiser, among songwriters I deeply admire, no one is on a higher plane than Prine. Around 1975, just a few years after I began learning guitar and singing, a college roommate, Aron Wolf, introduced me to Prine’s mix of...

I hope you’ll listen to this valuable discussion with three authors of a voluminous new report critically reviewing the conclusions of President Trump’s climate science “red team” report on clima,te science. ( You can explore a rough transcript here .) You’ll meet authors Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M, who co-writes the The Climate Brink on Substack; Bob Kopp, a longtime climate scientist at Rutgers...

Bill McKibben and I differ on some issues (the decarbonizing role of nuclear energy is one; big theories of change are another) but we agree on a lot and vive la différence given the inevitability of “response diversity” facing wicked stresses. And he’s right that the accelerating surge of solar electricity generation, from Pakistan rooftops to African villages to the California and Texas grids, i...

This is the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation eploring how cities, counties and perhaps your community can use data mapping and visualization tools to get ahead of climate risks as people and property increasingly sprawl into flood, fire, heat and storm danger zones - and as human-amped climate change intensifies some of those hazards. Watch above and share this post, or do the same on...

I pulled together a quick live Sustain What event today zooming out from the latest dramatic glacial lake outburst flood generated in Suicide Basin up in the mountains above Juneau, Alaska. That’s pretty far from most of us, but the challenge posed when glaciers block rivers and suddenly disgorge vast volumes of water extends to the Himalalyas, where millions of people live downstream of such dead...

I hope you’ll listen to, and share, this conversation on climate policy in the age of Trump (and lots more) with the wide-ranging Harvard economist Cass Sunstein . Sunstein worked under two presidents - Barack Obama ( social cost of carbon ) and Joe Biden ( Homeland Security ) - and has a new book out encapsulating his argument for a morals-based global accounting system for carbon: Climate Justic...

Public Domain is a valuable Substack project founded by journalists focused on U.S. public lands and the agencies responsible for managing those assets for all Americans. Here’s the podcast post of my conversation with two co-founders, Chris D'Angelo and Jimmy Tobias . You can watch and share on Facebook , LinkedIn , X/Twitter and YouTube . Here’s one excerpt. I asked Jimmy Tobias how it feels to...

Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What episode looking at: * The recent sabotage attack on a TV station’s weather radar in Oklahoma * The spread of unfounded extreme-weather conspiracies by Republican lawmakers and attention-hijacking online figures * How opacity around government and industry tests of weather modification methods has provided an enduring hook for conspiracy mongers to build...

This evergreen Sustain What conversation on trust and mistrust in climate science and scientists is - sadly - more relevant than ever. It was organized early in the pandemic by Gil Eyal , a sociologist at Columbia University focused on attitudes toward expertise (he literally wrote the book on this - The Crisis of Expertise ). Instead of running this Sustain What show, I was one of three discussan...

This is the podcast post of my Sustain What conversation with top experts on the role - and limits - of technology as a means of cutting losses when people live in harm’s way. The issues raised in the Texas tragedy (and travesty) resonate well beyond that state’s Flash Flood Alley. My guests were Jim Moffitt , a pre-Musk Twitter engineer focused on social media as a path to flood safety; Nashin Ma...

Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Michael Grunwald , the prize-winning environmental journalist and author whose latest book, We Are Eating The Earth , explores the destructive connections between people’s plates and forces wrecking ecosystems and overheating the climate. The book also charts sustainable paths forward with no sugar coating. Also on hand was Washington P...

File this post in the “sustainability of democracy” track. I just had an unplanned pop-up Sustain What conversation with the wide-ranging author Paul Greenberg about his bitingly satirical novella, A Third Term , and hope you take time for a listen. (I’ve known Paul for decades through his invaluable writing on fish and conservation.) His new work of fiction, in which George Washington is resurrec...

Today is #ShowYourStripesDay, aiming to sustain the push initiated years ago by UK climate scientist Ed Hawkins to use cool and warm colors to depict long-term climate change in ways that might grab attention and ultimately change choices and behavior. I’ve explored this innovation and related ones for a long time, most notably in a Sustain What webcast on Show Your Stripes Day in 2021 . I’ve repo...

Here’s my Sustain What conversation with Kate Marvel , a prominent climate scientist and communicator whose first book, Human Nature - Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet , is a bracing and deeply personal tour of climate science, planetary history and the array of hopeful and/or heartbreaking environmental futures ahead, depending on choices made or avoided now. Thank you, Matt Burgess an...

Given how Trumpism seems deadset on squeezing the dizzying diversity out of the United States, it seemed a great time to reach out to Peter Guttman , a world-roaming photographer who’s spent decades portraying the full prismatic wonder and weirdness of us. Please watch and/or share this conversation here or on Facebook , LinkedIn , X (at my handle @revkin ) or YouTube . Here’s a snippet focused on...

When I was building my sustainability communication project at Columbia University, I was recruited to be an author of a chapter on “ communicating risk for decision-making ” in what would become the 2022 Global Assessment Report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. I couldn’t participate fully in the end (boring reasons) but gained a valuable view of the depth and breadth o...

Whenever you need a break from the dueling pundits, have a listen to one of my Sunday Sanity shows . For those who missed us live on Sunday , here’s an audio and video antidote for Trump’s lock on our brains - a conversation, poetry reading and picking party with a couple of remarkably creative humans - the provocateur poet Andrei Codrescu , who you may have heard as a frequent NPR commentator in...

Update June 3 | In another demonstration of the Trump administration’s reckless and damaging whiplash approach to funding of vital programs, the initial freeze on this vital conduit for weather data has been reversed. But note that the Unidata blog post below includes this line about sustained threats to funding: This positive development allows us to end the current furlough of our staff and resu...