When We Are with Alex Steffen

Move. Move yourself out of the path of destruction. Relocation is one of the foundational responses to the climate crisis. If you’re one of the many millions living in communities facing escalating physical risks and deepening economic brittleness, not being there when things get really bad may be the smartest strategy you can have. It’s also, in some ways, a strategy with a deadline. See, to move...

Growing climate and ecological discontinuity is now colliding with inaction and inertia from governments and major institutions. It is clear that different places and communities will have widely varying outcomes as the crisis worsens. We are forced to become students of the systems we depend on, looking to assess not only the risks we face but also the extent to which those systems will respond o...

The gap between what we need to do to ruggedize for the climate chaos now unfolding and what we are doing is so large that whole regions, whole communities and many families will find themselves falling into brittleness. Over the next couple of weeks, we’re giving a short tour of the key questions in personal climate ruggedization. What are the major risks and how do we understand them? What does...

Today we explore discontinuity risk . Not only do we face climate chaos from within brittle systems, but the sheer scale and scope of changes around us make it harder to know if we’re making valid decisions. Formally sound choices are transformed into new liabilities. Over the next couple of weeks, I’m leading a short tour of the key questions in personal climate ruggedization. What are the major...

Climate chaos is here. What’s the plan? Over the next couple weeks, we’re giving a short tour of the key questions in personal climate ruggedization. What are the major risks and how do we understand them? What does it mean to live in a time with no new normal? What are the fundamental steps we can take to survive, thrive and prosper in the midst of a planetary crisis? Today, I explore the questio...

How do we ready ourselves for climate chaos? Over the next couple weeks, we’re giving you a short tour in climate preparation: Climate foresight. Discontinuity. What it means to live during unprecedented changes. How to understand the new risks we now face. Why the economic brittleness brought on by climate chaos is the greatest danger most of us face. Avoiding getting trapped in places with shrin...

Hey friends, This is the first episode in a new series we’re doing on the fundamentals of designing a personal climate strategy. Over the next couple weeks, we’ll discuss the basics: Climate foresight. Discontinuity. What it means to live during unprecedented changes. How to understand the new risks we now face. Why the economic brittleness brought on by climate chaos is the greatest danger most o...

Do you know how much climate chaos is costing you, now? This episode of When We Are is a quick exploration of how much loss is both a) already being incurred, and b) largely being ignored (or even being actively denied). We can’t avoid future loss completely, but turning our attention to the ways we now face riskier, more brittle and less prosperous futures can help us make better decisions as cli...

Find out more about my Personal Climate Strategy Workshop here . We live in a planetary crisis that is at its very core intergenerationally unjust . The vast majority of the benefits of predatory delay and extractive prosperity have gone to (and been consumed by) the oldest people in out society, while their unprecedented costs will land most heavily on the youngest. But what if being young and bo...

Reminder : The early-bird for the next live Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics ends on Tuesday, March 10! Sign up now for $97 (save $100). Class meets Thursday, March 19th at 12pm Pacific. I think of it as “The Myth of the Starting Gun and the Flat Track Fallacy.” There are two parts here: The Starting Gun: the idea that climate action and response will have a definable moment of acceleration,...

Millions of us are disoriented. In this podcast, I explore what foresight tells us about disorientation. We’ve all been raised, educated and trained to understand the world around us. Much of that understanding, though, is tethered to notions about the shape and behavior of systems. Many of those notions, in turn, we absorb in a variety of informal ways that are lived, social or cultural — what we...

In this episode of When We Are , I talk about those insisting that you can’t possibly choose a safer place to weather the climate crisis, because every place is endangered. I discuss why this claim is obviously wrong (some places are, in fact, relatively safe ), and also who benefits from making it. Like every part of the climate crisis, our understanding of risk and ruggedization are undermined b...

You’re probably less doomed than you think. If you spend much time trying to figure out how to ready yourself for this accelerating climate crisis, you will likely encounter the idea that there’s nothing you can do. Game over, man. You don’t have to look very far to find people ringing in the apocalypse and inviting you to lie back and greet the collapse. Writing and teaching about climate foresig...

Soft denialism is climate denialism that denies not the reality of climate change, but rather its importance. In this podcast, I touch on the TrumpII-era resurgence of soft denialism, Bill Gates’ misguided climate memo, and the Atlantic’s claim that “climate adaptation is indistinguishable from efforts to improve human welfare.” Along the way, I explain why failing to understand the climate crisis...

In my last podcast, I laid out why our horizons of concern are so important. In particular, I talked about how having kids (or grandkids or nieces and nephews, or chosen family, or whatever) makes us care about events that many still consider far off in the future… but that will be within their lifetimes. Having a longer decision horizon means planning for a wildly different world, and doing our b...

In this podcast, I talk about our horizons of concern. I discuss what it means to love kids who will experience the full blast of the climate crisis, decades from now. When facing threats that are fast-moving and increasingly chaotic, it’s natural to want a simple answer. The more threat and confusion we feel, the simpler the answer we’re likely to seek. Someone is always prepared to provide those...

Hey folks, This is a bit of a longer podcast, where I unpack some of the uncomfortable realities of this present moment in the planetary crisis — and why we need a new approach to solutions thinking and chosen optimism. Some of the ideas discussed : * How I’ve been reluctant to engage the more conflict-generating parts of climate foresight in public, but am done being circumspect. * The violent re...

The Trump gang has continued their chaos attack on America, most recently by gutting the next National Climate Assessment, including dismissing the group of scientists and experts preparing it . In this podcast, I quickly explain: * What the NCA is, and why it’s so useful. * Why clear climate assessments, delivered through transparent processes, are so critical to climate foresight — both in Ameri...

Notes for this podcast: “Being too far ahead is the same thing as being wrong.” —James Allworth If you talk about the future, you risk having a market that's still unprepared to see the value in what you're offering to them. But sometimes what was too far ahead becomes exactly what people now need to know. We're seeing a sea change in climate foresight. An abrupt collision with reality, that is sn...

Reminder : My intensive Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization begins Tuesday. Registration ends tonight at 11:59 pm Pacific time. Ready to sign up? Click the button below. Or click this link https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule/21f79c52/?appointmentTypeIds[]=73970428 Recognizing when we are can be a life-changing experience. In this podcast I explore how, for a growing number of us, it no lo...

My intensive Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization begins next week. Five, two-hour classes held via Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays (March 11th, 13th, 18th, 20th and 25th). A 90 minute wrap-up Q&A discussion on Thursday, March 27th. Class Times: 11:00am Pacific Standard Time (PST) Ready to sign up? Click the button below. Or click this link https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule/21f79c52/?appo...

In this podcast, I react to the recent New York Times piece How Can I Lower My Climate Risk When Buying a House? The piece begins by noting the rising concern people have with the growing risks they take on when buying a home: “A question we get from readers more and more is some version of this: How should the growing risks from climate change affect my decision to buy a house? Or, if I buy a hou...

Hey folks, How much will our refusal to acknowledge the climate crisis cost us? One way to start answering that question is to talk about brittleness . Brittleness is the quality of being subject to sudden, difficult-to-reverse failures. Climate brittleness describes brittleness created by the gap between the conditions for which our systems were built, and the different, more-chaotic circumstance...

Hey folks— If you feel, right now, like you are waking up to a magnitude of upheaval you didn’t expect — if you feel really unsure about what it means and what you should do to manage the resulting chaos in your own life — you are not alone. Working through this sudden collision with planetary reality is work we will all be forced to take up in the next few years. In this podcast, I unpack discont...

Hey folks— How do I remain an optimist about the human future, even as the planetary crisis worsens? A few thoughts. Alex PS: A little more to chew on: * More here on the mythological universal conversion event , and how we might think more clearly about the future . * Why real optimism springs from grasping what fights are now winnable and why outspoken optimism is actually critical to winning th...