Sustain What?

Peter Raven, 1936 - 2026 Rhett Ayers Butler , the founder of the biodiversity-focused online news network Mongabay, has posted a marvelous tribute laying out the extraordinary life and legacy of Peter Raven , a groundbreaking botanist and fierce defender of Earth’s biological diversity who died over the weekend at age 89. I was lucky to get to know Raven over a couple of decades as an expert sourc...

There’s no one more focused on building a future with affordable, delicious, nutritious, ethically produced food than Bruce Friedrich , a onetime PETA animal rights activist who’s co-founder and president of the Good Food Institute. His focus is protein - in the form we know of as meat. I was very happy to get a chance to speak with him about the group’s work advancing alternative meats (whether p...

On a road trip from Maine to Nashville and back, visiting our sons and other kin, my wife and I spent a couple of days back in the Hudson Valley, where I popped into the studios of Radio Kingston to speak with my old environmental-media compadre Jon Bowermaster for his Green Radio Hour show . Bowermaster, a couple of years older than I am, has amassed an extraordinary globe-spanning body of great...

This is the post-webcast post of my invigorating and unnerving conversation with Andrew Maynard and Jeffrey Abbott , the authors of a “practical guide to thriving with AI while rediscovering yourself in the process.” The curtain raiser post is here with more background: The more I dive into the free downloadable (and AI-uploadable) version of AI and the Art of Being Human , the more I appreciate w...

It’s hard to stay centered on issues around sustainable development and climate policy when the fragility of nations — economicaly, politically or otherwise — is in the foreground. (Sure we should get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible as Bill McKibben and Rebecca Solnit and so many others wisely counsel in the face of the latest Gulf war. But even best-case possibilities on that track will t...

Here’s the post-show post of my conversation with planetary-intelligence analyst Adam Frank on the roles of science and fath in human affairs, the arguments for and against humanity’s sustainability, the need for multi-generational approaches to addressing climate change and so much more. Please listen to the full show and, as important, SHARE it. Sharing is the only way we grow the Sustain What c...

Just in case you missed the live event, here’s my Sustain What conversation with two passionate climate communicators, both with experience in broadcast news media, pursuing distinct strategies via online video. Each has a very distinct vision of the path to action, and - as I exclaimed during the show, that’s exactly what’s needed. The climate challenge, and audiences out there, are both far too...

There’s a lot going on. For me, at least, one vital counterpoint is music — writing it, performing it, and convening with musician friends to talk about it. (If you happen to be in Downeast Maine this Thursday, March 5, come hear my first effort at an event in which I talk and sing about my interrelated life tracks in journalism and songwriting .) Today, I want to introduce you to a dear old music...

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live Sustain What show on Team Trump’s effort to demolish a foundational finding by the Environmental Protection Agency - that heat-trapping greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. My guests were: * Jonathan Adler, a William and Mary Law School professor and commentator with a libertarian orientation who’s deeply dug in at the intersection of la...

Boy this conversation with End of Science author John Horgan and transhumanism fan Steve Fuller was fun, given how dark some of our conclusions were. Read the pre-show post to get a lot of relevant links and background: Precautionary versus “proactionary” strategies for managing the present with the future in mind Fuller said it’s important to let go of many of our worries about how present action...

I just had a truly helpful - and dare I say hopeful - pop-up conversation with Columbia University’s Gernot Wagner - a top-notch climate policy and economics analyst - on what to think and work on as the Trump Administration carries out its long-pledged plan to repeal the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” by the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama. Quick points: * The litigation over t...

This is the post-show podcast post of my Sustain What conversation with Christopher Mims, the Wall Street Journal tech columnist and author of How to AI , and Melanie Mitchell , the Santa Fe Institute researcher deeply dug in on the thing called artificial intelligence that remains pretty unintelligent. If you want to understand where this exposively evolving technology is, and isn’t, taking us, y...

This was a deeply illuminating conversation with top-flight researchers aiming to get beyond the back-and-forth edge-driven volleys on global warming’s role in shaping severe winter weather in the United States. Watch above or watch and share on Facebook , LinkedIn , YouTube and X/Twitter. Here’s one key point from Jacob Chalif, the lead author of a 2025 study that found the recent upswing in wavi...

I have deeply mixed feelings about AI in music, which I’ll elaborate on soon. But as a songwriter in act three of my life, and facing the reality that it takes a lot of time and money to build full productions of songs, I’ve started using Suno to envision what my barebones guitar-and-vocal tunes can sound like on a bigger scale. I am going to pull together some of the wonderful musicians around ou...

There were many notable moments in my Sustain What discussion of Russian and American political propaganda, so I encourage you to watch the whole show. But here are a couple of highlights: Andrew Ryvkin , who created propaganda for the Kremlin for many years and now writes about information wars (now living in the United States), described a talk show he produced more than a decade ago, called “Ho...

First, I hope you can find time to listen to this evergreen conversation I had with Renee Hobbs , a leading authority and educator (at the University of Rhode Island) aiming to spread propaganda literacy. Her mission, in essence, is to help us all cut through the ever-evolving superstorm of online material and widgets designed to alarm, disarm, distract, confuse or entice - in other words, to ensh...

I’ll be doing another conversation about Trump’s threats to take Greenland soon - with Greenlanders. But I had to elevate the important statement made on January 9 in defense of the 57,000 citizens who inhabit Greenland’s coastal communities - signed by more than 200 American scientists who have worked on that giant ice-sheathed island. The curtain raiser post for this webcast with Greenland-focus...

Here’s the audio/video podcast post of my live conversation with a determined duo of longtime broadcast journalists spending two months with intrepid scientists aboard the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon seeking fresh data that could show how fast Antarctica’s most vulnerable ice mass, the Thwaites Glacier, could raise sea levels. Miles O'Brien and Kate Tobin are an independent team working toget...

I hope you’ll great Sustain What chat on the shifting nature of climate journalism and the role of culture in climate [in]action with Sammy Roth . His 14-year track on the climate and energy beat has taken him from the Desert Sun to the Los Angeles Times (where his Boiling Point newsletter became a key read for climate-concerned folks) to Substack since October, with his fast-growing Climate Color...

Here’s the webcast/podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Jennifer D. Sciubba , the new president of the near-century-old Population Reference Bureau , a longtime source of unspun demographic data and analysis. The focal point was her new book (with two veteran expert coauthors), Toxic Demography - Ideology and the Politics of Population . Learn more in my “curtain raiser” post: But he...

This is the Substack Live video and audio podcast post of my Sustain What chat with journalist Tina Kelley and lawyer Eric Jepeal, who are seeking partners for Commonloop , a social media platform that would funnel revenue generated from humans’ online habits (which are unlikely to change soon) into enterprises or programs that are a boon for all of us - instead of a boon for billionaires. Here’s...

I think you’ll love this Sustain What conversation I just had with Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, the brilliant young playwrights behind Kyoto , the tragicomic play describing the titanic diplomatic and political tussle as climate change science threatened to bring an early end to the fossil fuel age. My “curtain raiser” post has a heap of details and related links: But much more emerged in the dis...

I needed an intervention today and reached out to my old friend from the anti-consumption wars, the Rev Billy Talen of the Church of Stop Shopping, and to Lloyd Alter , one of the great longtime guides to low-impact and low-carbon building, transportation and the rest. I hope the resulting conversation above offers a tonic during this crazy “Black Friday” week. You can also watch and share it on F...

I hope you can watch and weigh in on this conversation I had on the final official day of COP30, the thirtieth round of climate treaty talks, which are wrapping up in Belém, the gateway city to Brazil’s vast portion of the Amazon River basin. First we had a pop-up update from my friend Cristiane Prizibisczki , a veteran Brazilian environmental journalist covering the meeting for the great online p...

James Fahn founded the Earth Journalism Network 20 years ago. The organization has helped foster the reporting capacity of journalists around the world and helped build innovative colllaborative news networks like InfoNile and InfoAmazonia . Here I caught him in the middle of the 30th session of negotiations under the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that is the foundation f...