Sustain What?

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...

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...