By Important, Not Important
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The podcast currently has 539 episodes available.
What's the missing link in local journalism?
That's today's big question, and my guest is Lyndsey Gilpin.
Lyndsey is the Senior Manager of Community Engagement at Grist. Lyndsey was the founder and executive editor at Southerly, a nonprofit media organization that equipped people who face environmental injustices and are at most at risk of climate change effects with journalism and resources on natural disasters, pollution, food, energy, and more.
It was very groundbreaking, and now she's brought that to Grist. Lyndsey was recently a John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow at Stanford University, focusing on information access in rural southern communities of color, where she is from, based in Louisville.
And in an age of mass dis and misinformation it's more important than ever that we not only fund journalism and obviously read it, but local journalism and journalists and publishers, editors, photographers, documenters, and more that are of the communities they are based in, who have and continue to build trust in an ongoing, two way conversation to help people get information, to connect the last mile and make sure it goes back and forth.
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Basic Shit
This entire (short!) episode is a call to action. It's time to do this thing...do the thing, but also take care of yourselves and your loved ones these next couple weeks.
It's a lot right now.
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Is multisolving the future? Is it today? Should we do more?
That's all today's big question and my guest is Dr. Elizabeth Sawin.
Dr. Sawin is the Founder and Director of the Multisolving Institute, which is convenient for our conversation. She's an expert on solutions that address climate change while also improving health, well being, and economic vitality. She developed multisolving to describe such win win win solutions.
Beth writes and speaks about multisolving, climate change, and leadership in complex systems for both national and international audiences.
Since 2014, Beth has participated in the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, a continuing dialogue on issues of climate change and sustainability among a select group of humanities scholars, writers, artists, and climate scientists.
Beth is a biologist with a Ph.D. From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M. I. T. She co-founded Climate Interactive in 2010 and served as Climate Interactive's co-director from 2010 until 2022.
Beth’s work has influenced me quite a bit, as you can see in the app.
We've got co benefits all over the place, more on that soon and today. She's been on the list for a while here, and yet it took a couple recent hurricanes to actually get her on the show to talk about her journey, her mentors, her new book, and how we can most effectively deal with all of this.
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How do we make it easier for more Americans to reliably put food (in particular, hot food) on the table?
That's today’s big question, and my guest is Salaam Bhatti.
Salaam is the SNAP Director at the Food Research and Action Center, a 501c3 that uses advocacy and strategic partnerships to improve the health and well being of people struggling against poverty related hunger in the United States.
Before joining the Food Research and Action Center, Salam was the Public Benefits Attorney and Deputy Director of the Virginia Poverty Law Center where he specialized in public benefits law.
Salaam also served as the director of Virginia Hunger Solutions, where he supported the initiative's mission of eradicating hunger and enhancing the nutrition, health, and overall well being of children and families living in poverty throughout this great commonwealth.
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We first ran this episode in May 2023, but following back-to-back hurricanes in Florida this month, it remains as relevant as ever.
You've got insurance, right? Are you sure?
That's today's big question, and my guest is Washington Post reporter Brianna Sacks.
Brianna's an extreme weather and disaster reporter for the Post, where she explores how climate change is transforming the United States through violent storms, intense heat, widespread wildfires, and other forms of extreme weather.
Brianna deploys to disaster zones, which are sometimes very close to home, and does enterprise reporting on the preparations for responses to and the aftermaths of catastrophic events.
We're having this conversation today because last month Brianna revealed how insurers have slashed Hurricane Ian payouts far below damage estimates, often up to 80%.
I cannot emphasize enough that the future includes an insurance landscape that is among the most important in our very brittle economy and society.
It underpins everything we rely on, so understanding not only your own insurance but how well your mortgage holder and the system at large are prepared for what's here and what's coming, is essential.
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There’s no word for “conservation” in many Indigenous languages.
Some come close, but mean something more like “taking care of” or “looking after.”
And that’s probably because the very idea of conservation, to “prevention the wasteful use of a resource”, would have been, and continue to be, foreign to many of North America’s Indigenous peoples, who lived in an entirely different, co-dependent relationship with nature.
That is to say, to have had a relationship at all.
A relationship with the very same nature of which we’re inextricably part of, of which we rely on for clean air, food, and water – or it’s game over.
And now, if we’re not facing game over, we’re certainly up against the final boss.
We live on stolen lands that were tended for thousands of years by Indigenous and Native peoples have been dried out by mostly white settlers in what seems like the blink of an eye.
Land now covered in cities, in suburbs, in industrialized agriculture, desperately and even controversially conserved as national and state parks.
Waters onshore and offshore, full of plastic and fertilizer, once bountiful, now overfished.
The receipts are in and it’s not gone well for colonialists’ stewardship over the single habitable ecosystem as far as anyone can tell.
New voices are needed, new policies and practices are needed, and perhaps the most compelling ones come from our land’s longest-tenured human inhabitants.
And while, yes, I’m focused on actions we can take to build a vastly cleaner and better future for all people, you know I work hard to bring you the necessary context, to understand how we got here, why we got here, to understand the decisions and systems involved – all of which should only make us more effective at taking action.
My guest today is Dr. Jessica Hernandez.
Dr. Hernandez is an environmental scientist, founder of environmental non-profit Piña Soul, and the author of the new book, “Fresh Banana Leaves”, where she weaves together her family’s relationship with nature, as part of nature, her family’s history of being displaced over and over, through the lens of eco-colonialism, and how Indigenous-led restoration is the way forward.
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You’d think that -- considering we just spent two years building our new What Can I Do? app -- that I’d have a really good answer for why we were doing it in the first place.
But I didn’t. Not until about a week ago.
I knew, of course, the practical reasons why it needed to exist, and I had a good idea of what I wanted it to look and feel like.
I knew it was the natural evolution and a significant missing piece of our work.
But I had never really interrogated myself to understand why I was so hell-bent on building an app -- a tool -- that gathered all the action steps we’d researched over the years, and made them accessible to anyone across the world, anytime they wanted or needed them.
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Mentioned in this episode:
Basic Shit
It’s another big day in a very big month for us.
Our extremely tiny team has been busting our asses for almost two years to bring you something fucking extraordinary, something I’m just so proud of, and now it's here:
Our new app: "What Can I Do?"
A one stop shop for taking action on the issues you give a shit about.
Why?
Because the world won't unf**k itself.
Get it here: https://www.whatcanido.earth/
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What if we get it right?
That's today's big question, and my returning guest is Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist. She is a policy expert, a writer, and a teacher working to help create the best possible climate future. She co-founded and leads the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for the future of coastal cities, and is the Roux Distinguished Scholar at Bowdoin College.
Ayana authored the forthcoming book, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures, co-edited the best selling climate anthology, All We Can Save, and co-created and co-hosted the Spotify slash Gimlet podcast, How to Save a Planet. Lastly, she co-authored the Blue New Deal, a roadmap for including the ocean, what an idea, into climate policy.
This is a special one for me.
Ayana was guest number seven or eight on the show a long time ago. She took a chance on us. And almost 200 episodes later, a pandemic later, a few degrees of warming later, a lot has changed.
But Ayana's passion for nature, her influence on U.S. and global policy and our one wonderful habitable planet has not.
I am such a huge fan of hers, and I am so thankful she came back to spend time with us.
If you have been trying to find your way into this whole thing, today just might be your day.
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Basic Shit
In this throwback episode from October 2020, Quinn & Brian discuss: Why state elections matter not just for your state but for the future of our planet.
Our guests are: Aimy Steele & Amanda Litman.
Aimy is a candidate for the North Carolina House of Representatives in District 82, a mother of five, a former Spanish teacher, and a former K-12 principal.
Amanda is the co-founder and Executive Director of Run For Something, a PAC that is recruiting and supporting young progressives who want to run for state and local elections. They’re endorsing more than 500 candidates in the 2020 elections, primarily women and people of color, and they’re inviting all of us to take an active role in writing a new future for our country.
And let me tell you -- if those 500 candidates are even half as inspiring as Aimy, we’re in for one hell of a new generation of state representatives. Aimy represents one of those rare times when we get the hero we need and they’re so much better than we deserve.
Really, we probably do deserve a horde of bitter white men who all go to the same discount barber, but our world will be so much better off if we elevate diverse voices who actually know how to help our country’s diverse communities.
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Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]
New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.
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