Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Natural and human-made extreme weather events are disrupting food systems worldwide, threatening the long-term economic stability and health of already vulnerable populations. Across the globe, 80 percent of the poorest live in rural communities and rely on smallholder farming for their household food and income. And smallholder farmers produce around one-third of the total share of the world’s food, yet are disproportionately affected by climate risks, uncertainty, and poverty, often having limited resources to adapt to these changes.

Then how are these communities building resilience and developing better strategies to cope with a changing climate?

This panel brings in two perspectives within the climate field: financial need in scaling climate solutions, and research on how climate change impacts agricultural systems and human health. Mercedes de la Vega is an associate director of climate partnerships at Acumen, leading strategic partnerships at the intersection of climate solutions and poverty. She helps mobilize capital to serve businesses, driving change for the climate-vulnerable communities, strengthening their ecosystems. Tammy Nicastro is a researcher affiliate at UCSF who focuses on studies of climate-sensitive agricultural livelihood interventions and their impacts on improving agricultural productivity and income, and household nutrition and health for smallholder farmers to support individuals’ health and nutritional needs.

As climate pressures intensify, research, innovations, and investments in improving healthier food systems, improving health outcomes, and building resilience will shape the lives of future generations living in areas most vulnerable to climate disasters.

An International Relations Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

Organizer: Frank Price 

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It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Yet Jeremy Lent says that is what this historical moment urgently calls for. As climate chaos, inequality and social fragmentation intensify, humanity faces an imminent choice: continue with a system built on extraction and endless growth, or reimagine civilization itself. He says incremental policy improvements are no longer enough, and what is needed is a deep transformation of our current civilization to continue to survive.

Lent offers up such a reimagination, grounded in proven design principles of ecosystems and in humankind’s evolved inclinations. He prescribes a robust framework incorporating his own expertise, and the experiences of those on the ground already putting ecological civilization’s core tenets into practice: justice, mutuality, diversity and symbiosis.

From the global economy to universal housing and income, from infrastructure to agriculture, Lent says every major aspect of our society could be redesigned to work together as a coherent whole, setting the conditions for all people to flourish. Join us as Lent discusses why he believes this future is not only desirable, but entirely feasible.

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Russian officials and experts often voice the view that the United States was hell-bent on undermining, even destroying Russia during the turbulent period of the Soviet breakup 30 years ago. The primary U.S. goal, in this telling, was to expand NATO to Russia’s borders to isolate and threaten the Russian state.

Former NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller, drawing from the historical record and her own professional experience, refutes this notion. Gottemoeller argues that, to the contrary, successive American presidents were convinced that deep cooperation with Russia is essential to international security and stability. This conviction was born during the George H.W. Bush administration and took definitive shape during the administration of Bill Clinton, when he and his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin agreed to develop technological cooperation that would be useful to both countries. 

While today is starkly different from the 1990s, Gottemoeller’s new book Security Through Cooperation takes the lessons learned and considers what it would take—when Russia exits its horrific adventure in Ukraine and atones for the damage it has done—to resume cooperation for the sake of global security.

Join Rose Gottemoeller to hear about the issues raised in her book as well as her thoughts on the future of NATO, and her analysis of the Iran war. 

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Founding Father James Wilson’s bold vision for American democracy was lost to scandal. As a young lawyer, Wilson made the case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He wrote the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the much more famous James Madison, played an essential role in its creation.

Wilson believed that the people are the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, but fought unsuccessfully for a direct vote for the president and the Senate. Appointed as a justice to the first Supreme Court, Wilson was later brought down by reckless land speculation and died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.

Because of that scandal, instead of being remembered as one of our nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson has been virtually written out of American history books. But journalist Jesse Wegman brings to life this most prescient of our earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not have diminished the life and impact of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for our country could not be more relevant today.

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Join Matt Biggar, Ph.D., for a lively discussion of his new book, Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Community, and Local Economies Through Systems Change, followed by the introduction of Transforming Our Region, a new Member-led Forum at Commonwealth Club World Affairs. This new forum will apply the systems change approach featured in Connected to Place to the Bay Area through expert presentations and interactive activities. 

Biggar discusses place-based systems change as a real-world solution to our growing environmental and social challenges. He says at the core of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss, rising economic inequality, and growing social division lies a deeper crisis of disconnectedness. Dominant economic forces continually push us away from nature, community and each other. Place-based systems offer an alternative model and are gaining traction in places around the world, both urban and rural. 

In Connected to Place, Biggar presents a vision that reorients people’s daily lives around their neighborhoods, cities and regions. Through place-based living, we can create lasting, regenerative change that addresses our biggest problems while boosting the quality of everyday life. 

Most important, Biggar shows us how we can get there with a practical guide to systems change that draws on real-world examples from his research and practice. By reframing our approach to social progress, he outlines the way toward rebuilding connection with nature and local community and revitalizing local and regional economies. Join us as Biggar shares how this is happening and how you can be a part of it here in the Bay Area.

About the Speaker

Matt Biggar, Ph.D., is a place-based strategy consultant, systems thinker, speaker, writer and university lecturer. He is the principal and founder of Connected to Place, a strategy consulting firm that supports place-based collaboratives, nonprofits, government agencies, and schools with facilitation, strategic planning, and community engagement. Biggar earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University, where his research involved behavioral science, sustainability, transportation and collective impact. He is the author of Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Community, and Local Economies through Systems Change (Cornell University Press, 2025) and several published articles in academic journals, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and other outlets.

A Transforming Our Region Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

Organizer: Anne Smith & Matt Biggar 

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Wisconsin was written off by many Democrats after the GOP gained total control over the state’s executive, judicial, and legislative branches. For a while, the state—once known for clean government and transparency—became a national symbol of a highly gerrymandered state. But the Democrats figured out how to win, and they slowly and methodically rebuilt their power, regaining the governor’s office, cutting into legislative majorities, and are now on a run of consecutive landslide election victories for Democratic-leaning state supreme court justices, who are in the majority.
How did it happen? 
Get an inside look when Ben Wikler visits Commonwealth Club World Affairs. Wikler, who has been hailed as the “preeminent state party chair” by Nancy Pelosi, led Wisconsin Democrats through a series of hold-your-breath fights against right-wingers that resulted, against the odds, in the unrigging of the political system of the most divided state in the nation. 
Now, he draws on decades of experience in everything from school-board races to presidential elections to bring people inside the hidden web of power that shapes their lives. At every step, he shows what individuals and small groups can do to help build a future where democracy thrives and our country works for everyone. Join us as he draws on that experience and his new book This Is the Plan, an idealistic-yet-practical guide to turning the present crisis into a better future.

Note: This podcast may contain explicit language.

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In a recent essay, President George W. Bush hails George Washington’s decision to leave the presidency after two terms, ensuring America would not become a monarchy. “[His] humility in giving up power willingly remains among the most consequential decisions and important examples in American politics.”

Bush’s essay is part of the In Pursuit project, a new bipartisan civic initiative tied to the 250th anniversary of the United States. In Pursuit brings together an extraordinary roster of contributors, including reflections by Barack Obama on Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton on Theodore Roosevelt.

“Presidents are powerful proxies for each of the distinct time periods that have made up our first 250 years, and as everyday citizens first and foremost who take on extraordinary responsibilities, they are also the preeminent way for us all to reflect on what leadership in our democracy is really all about,” said In Pursuit CEO Colleen Shogan, the 11th archivist of the United States.

But it’s not just presidents. First Ladies Laura Bush, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton are included, as are Chief Justice John Roberts and leading historians—each to distill one enduring lesson for future generations.

In Pursuit is a project of More Perfect, a bipartisan alliance of 37 presidential centers and more than 100 civic organizations.

Join us for a conversation about In Pursuit with Shogan as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning Stanford historian Jack Rakove and UC Berkeley political scientist Eric Schickler. They’ll discuss what this project reveals about the future of American democracy and qualities of leadership, character and governance that have shaped the republic across 250 years. 

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Fergus Bordewich returns to Commonwealth Club World Affairs with the spectacular story of the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia: a world’s fair designed to mark America’s 100th birthday, but also a moment of reckoning for a nation sliding headlong into the Gilded Age.

The extravaganza attracted 10 million Americans—nearly 20 percent of the population. Among them were P. T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain. Visitors from around the world also attended, including Dom Pedro, the emperor of Brazil. On display were inventions that signaled the changing landscape of American life, from the typewriter to the telephone to Heinz Tomato Ketchup.

This celebration of America’s first century came at a moment when its future seemed more precarious than ever, as big money threatened to overwhelm the government, underpaid workers waged the first national labor strike, feminists demanded rights for women, Native tribes went to war to repel the advancing settlement of the West, and Black Americans struggled to exercise their hard-won freedoms. And looming over the fair was the presidential race of 1876—a highly contested election that would determine the fate of Reconstruction and permanently reshape the Republican party.

Fergus Bordewich animates these converging crises through the lives of four protagonists—Rutherford B. Hayes, Alexander Graham Bell, railroad magnate Tom Scott, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis—revealing an America striving to live up to the promise of its founders while bracing for the tidal wave of change on the horizon.

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Atmospheric scientist Ben Santer pioneered the research that connects human activity to specific climate events. Now, pursuing treatment for a rare type of lymphoma, he sees his own diagnosis and his climate science as the same kind of detective work: using essential and basic science to conduct tests, read complex markers, and rule out every other cause. Even while ill, he's calling out efforts by the Trump administration to reject, defund and ignore the science we all depend on. 

“If we leave basic science behind because the administration doesn't like the results of the science, then as Americans, we're not gonna thrive, and the planet isn't gonna thrive either,” Santer says.

Guests: 

Ben Santer, Atmospheric Scientist, University of East Anglia  

Rachel Rothschild, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Law School

Highlights:

00:00 – Introduction 

 2:24 – Ben Santer on how he’s doing amidst his health issues

 6:43 – Ben Santer on having the motivation to keep going 

 11:21 – Ben Santer on what it means to find human fingerprints on climate disruption 

16:52 – Ben Santer on the importance of climate measuring 

20:23 – Ben Santer on persevering through personal attacks and credible death threats

31:01 – Ben Santer on the effect of Trump administration funding cuts

33:43 – Ben Santer dealing with grief 

38:54 – Rachel Rothschild on how state superfund laws work

42:26 – Rachel Rothschild on having her personal communication targeted

47:40 – Rachel Rothschild on the personal tax of doing her work 

51:45 – Rachel Rothschild on what surprised her   

For show notes and related links, visit ⁠⁠our episode page⁠⁠ at ClimateOne.org

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What happens when a society elevates victimhood to a virtue and decides that punishment is cruel? You get the disease Dr. Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. And the West may be terminally infected.

Saad says “maladaptively irrational altruism” has gripped our culture. He calls it a mind parasite that has hijacked the empathy module of our progressive elite, leading to a catastrophic miscalibration of moral priorities. The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. He says we are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline, with bad policies instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over the truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. Saad says this is not only not humane—it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.

In his new book, Suicidal Empathy, Saad makes the case that we are experiencing a crisis of empathy that creates a horrifying system of inverse morality where the strong and successful are demonized, the destructive are celebrated, illegal migrants are prioritized over our own legal citizens and veterans, drug addicts are prioritized over children’s safety in parks, and more. 

Is common sense dying in a deluge of misguided compassion?

Join us as Gad Saad makes a provocative return to Commonwealth Club World Affairs.

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