Sustain What?

Insert, 3:15 p.m. - Months of planning and permits amounted to nothing as the Coast Guard, apparently on orders “from above” (see below), ordered the captain of the Sloop Clearwater, launched in 1969 by Pete Seeger and friends to clean the Hudson, to “turn your vessel around” instead of taking its place escorting a Portuguese square rigger up the Hudson in the big Fourth of July Sail 250 event (vi...

These days, many of us tend to think of coders, algorithms and AI as a predatory threat stalking our online communication environment, and all too often that is true. But here is an inspiring example of an effort to put these skills and technologies to vital use in an unfolding catastrophe. Jorge Bastidas normally spends his days in Buenos Aires as CTO of The Empire, a small Florida-registered com...

Here’s the post-show post and audio podcast for my conversation with the Capital Weather team, who’ve just returned to independence after 18 years of weather communication and community building affiliated with the Washington Post. Details are in the curtain-raiser post: We talked about their early days as a blog back in 2004, when co-founder Jason Samenow was at the Environmental Protection Agenc...

I just hosted a pop-up Sustain What conversation with three of the dozens of climate and weather scientists who are running a 50-Hour livestream to boost public appreciation of the observational and analytical science that bolsters societal resilience and boosts understanding of our amazing, and changing, planet. A goal is to sustain federal support for weather & climate science even as the curren...

Program note : Today at 11 a.m. Eastern, join me live with several of the dozens of scientists participating in a 50-Hour livestream to sustain federal support for weather & climate science : YouTube , LinkedIn , Substack , Facebook , and X. The webcast is under way through June 3: My conversation with Chris Mooney Here’s the post-webcast post of my conversation with Chris Mooney . In 20 years, Mo...

I’m continuing to write songs along with my Sustain What webcasting and blogging here — in part to keep sane and in part because this has always been one of my ways of connecting people with ideas. ( Buy my new album here .) In this post, you’re getting the first look and listen to the first rough recording of “Nothing is Quiet.” The lyrics — also still a work in progress — are below. Everyone can...

I just wrapped a super-sobering and, at the same time, fun and hopeful conversation on the urgent issues surrounding the plaid-speed evolution of AI. With my guests Brad Allenby and Andrew Maynard at Arizona State University, the prime focus was the Vatican rollout of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter and the Pope’s admonition today that “artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.” Please listen...

I hope you’ll watch and share this illuminating and constructive face-to-face discussion with four key analysts of the scenarios for emissions of planet-heating gases that indirectly have shaped, and sometimes misshaped, climate policy discourse and decisions (and media coverage). My guests were Richard Tol , Zeke Hausfather , Matt Burgess , and Roger Pielke Jr. As I discussed here recently , the...

I just hosted a great discussion of the importance of bolstering long-term observational science and the capacity to integrate findings into decision making and policy. As I wrote in the curtain raiser post on Thursday, what drives me nuts is that even scientists who think global warming warnings are way over the top agree on this fundamental point about long-term monitoring. I have to post this s...

Snag “ Wake Me up Martha ,” a sonic survival guide for these crazy times, on Bandcamp today - Bandcamp Friday - when the company doesn’t take its percentage: revkin.bandcamp.com . You can listen on every conceivable platform and they’re all here: andyrevkin.hearnow.com . Here’s the curtain raiser post that preceded this show: Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next...

J.A. Ginsburg , a k a Janet Ginsburg, is a business analyst and writer (and many other things) who is scouring the world for scientists and startups pursuing substitutes for the materials societies have long depended on — but that are in short supply because of bottlenecks like the one created by President Trump’s war on Iran. I urge you to sign up for her Substack project, which is the learning j...

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...