Sustain What?

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 - there’s always music. (Read my post explainng that side of my life if you haven’t already.) This new song of mine, “After the Roaming,” was inspired by a melody composed by fello...

UPDATED 10/28 9 am - As I’ve 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 tonight’s hate-filled Trump “rally.” As Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event was getting into gear on Sunday afternoon, I reached out to Marshall Curry , an Academy-Award winning film director. I...

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 “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” assessments by NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I’ve been deeply impressed with Harry Stevens ’ reporting on climate at the Washington Post in his Climate Lab columns. He’s...

Here’s the podcast version of my “ Watchwords ” conversation with Mekala Krishnan , the lead author of a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, “ The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition .” 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 exec...

First , here’s 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 , here’s 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 G...

Updated February 2025 - Given what’s unfolding under Trump 2.0, I thought it worth highlighting a Sustain What conversation I had in December 2020 with University of Rhode Island communications professor Renee Hobbs , who teaches propaganda literacy and is the author of a fantastic guide book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age . She has built a priceless suite of online learni...

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 it’s 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 co...

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 . Here’s 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 s...

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. That’s true even for bullet-grazed Trump. As I tweeted yesterday, the momentous shooting in Pennsylvania can lead...

Here’s a key point I made in today’s pop-up webcast: Think of Tornado Alley as a syndrome, not a place. And it isn’t what, and where, it used to be. In 2018, longtime tornado researchers Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University and Harold Brooks of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., completed widely-covered research showing a substantial shift in the particular meteor...

I hope you’ll 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 – What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. An updated edition was eleased on June 11th . You can also...

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 Putin’s full-scale invasion played out in 2022. That is what you’ll experience when the documentary “ Checkpoint Zo...

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 NOAA’s National Hurricane Center tracking and warning site . Don’t get too used to the storm-free image on the site at the moment: To stay sane as the media environment around hurricanes and clim...

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 , who’s driven some of the most significant innovations in state policy around waste reduction and now w...

I’ve spent a lot of time assessing ways to defeat what I call t he “complexity monster” impeding climate and energy solutions . Here’s 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 . (Here’s a rough Trint transcript .) I was intrigued to learn about an upcoming set of live semin...

📺 🎧 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...

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 t...

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...

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 , YouTub...

Please share this post - more than you might share others. INSERT - Join me with a batch of wonderful guests in a special pop-up live musical gathering Monday, January 1, New Year’s Day, at noon US Eastern time! Join on YouTube here: Also streaming on Facebook , LinkedIn and X/Twitter (no advance link in X; just join us at @revkin at showtime). ~ ~ Another year down, full of extreme heat and turmo...

I hope you’ll watch or listen to this wonderful Sustain What conversation on ways to navigate, and improve, this moment on Earth increasingly called the Anthropocene - the Earth as shaped by human activities, for worse or better. Some here will recall I played a role in the evolution of this concept thanks to a line in my 1992 book on global warming. See my essay about that at the bottom of this p...

My latest Sustain What conversation is a bit off the typical themes I’ve focused on since the early days of the pandemic. Our topic was innovations and lessons surrounding a giant-squid hunt. Watch and you’ll meet Nathan Robinson , a marine biologist and science communicator I got to know at a Global Exploration Summit we both spoke at last summer and his research collaborator and mentor Edie Widd...

For half a century, Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson , an extraordinary husband-and-wife science team at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, have been documenting both the decline of mountain glaciers in and around the tropics and the climate history locked in cylinders of ice they’ve extracted from such frozen libraries before they vanish. Now two filmmakers, Danny O’Malley and Alex...

I hope you’ll give a listen to this dose of grounded climate and development optimism from three wonderful contributors to the new essay collection and online project called Not Too Late - Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possiblity . I’m still trying to gauge who among you wants audio podcasts. Please let me know through my feedback form ! My guests were: * the best-selling author and a...

As thousands of propaganda-inflamed supporters of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro violently invaded the top offices of government in Brasilia today, I couldn’t help thinking back to the four months I spent in Brazil in 1989, the year the nation was in the midst of its first direct presidential elections since 1960. It was heartening to track reports tonight that this insurrectionist tide...