Sustain What?

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...

For audio podcast fans This is the audio of a webinar I just held for Columbia Climate School colleagues eager to sift for strategies making the most of online connectivity amid epic shifts, including Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. My internal work here at Columbia is focused on building science and policy communication pathways that are about more than clicks. The slides are posted here . My earli...

Yesterday I hosted a Columbia Climate School Sustain What conversation exploring what Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter means for the platform’s capacity to save lives in emergencies like extreme storms, floods, wildfires and other environmental emergencies. My featured guest was Jim Moffitt ( @snowman ), who worked in developer relations at Twitter for eight years building the capacity f...

This is the audio version of my Columbia Climate School Sustain What discussion of the world beyond 8 billion - focused on what factors in play today will determine the quality and quantity of human lives and the environment in the decades to come. Here’s video: Read the text post here: As the Human Population Tops 8 Billion, a Look Beyond Bomb📈 and Crash 📉 Panic Proclamations . Sift a rough tra...

As the latest wave of food-tossing, media-seeking climate emergency protests began, I pulled together a spirited Sustain What discussion featuring the executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, which is pouring millions of dollars into edge-pushing protest networks, a longtime performance activist and two sociologists deeply researching when activism does and doesn’t matter. My guests were...

Original Air Date: October 27, 2021 Drawing on insights from his book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal, our featured guest, Professor Noam Chomsky, will explore paths to climate progress on an overheating and starkly unequal planet with fresh assessments from Columbia Climate School's Jeff Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and Dr. Belinda Archibon...

Original Air Date: November 11, 2020 DESCRIPTION: Too often, politicians and the rest of us choose to wait for clarity before tackling tough, consequential, challenges. News media cover disastrous events far better than underlying drivers of risk - or resilience. To seek solutions, join Andy Revkin’s Earth Institute Sustain What brainstorm with participants in this year’s annual conference of the...

What decisions can we make today as individuals and societies to create a better tomorrow? Join Columbia Climate School's Andrew Revkin, economist Kate Raworth, and philosopher Roman Krznaric for a conversation on how reinventing economics and incorporating long-term thinking into our current policies can help us meet the challenges of climate breakdown and global inequality, and transform our wor...

October 7, 2020 On Fridays, the Sustain What webcast of Columbia University's Earth Institute dives behind headlines and hashtags with leading journalists and experts to offer insights on what's really afoot. A great panel is coming together to discuss this week's truly extraordinary developments, in which a president infected with the novel virus driving the COVID-19 pandemic checked out of a mil...

October 2, 2020 Thomas Homer-Dixon, the bestselling author of The Upside of Down and other books exploring pathways through complexity, joins Sustain What host Andy Revkin and two special guests in a bracing discussion of the themes of his latest work: "Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril." ( https://commandinghope.com/ ) The guests are: - Susan Cox-Smith, a partner and fu...

A pandemic and attendant economic crisis rock the world along with political and social turmoil intensified by an overheating information environment and overheating climate. What's a solution-oriented human being to do? Slow down and stretch your time scales, according to three experienced analysts of this extraordinary moment in human history. Join the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin, the philosop...

In this webcast, former senior intelligence and national security officers explore headlines noting that intelligence reports provided to the Trump White House had laid out the likelihood of a pandemic with unnerving clarity - and one even noted worrisome signs of a rapidly spreading virus in Wuhan in November (ABC: https://bit.ly/covid19wuhanintell ) But the challenge for this or any administrati...