New Thinking for a New World

Rapidly accelerating climate change is uniquely modern — but climate change is not. The planet has warmed and cooled in the past, even during mankind’s time. What can we learn from those events that might help us cope with the extremes that are our present and future? Can indigenous people who understand nature differently than most of us teach us how to cope with today’s terrifying challenges?

Our guest on this week’s New Thinking for a New World podcast, Tero Mustonen, is a climate scholar who combines indigenous knowledge with academic research. He is also a leader of the SnowChange Cooperative that works with indigenous people and climate issues throughout the Arctic, and currently the head of his town of Selkie in North Karelia, Finland.

Listen to his insights on how to promote positive change on a damaged planet.

Under President Xi Jinping, China has shown a growing willingness to act outside the accepted geopolitical, economic and even diplomatic global framework and practices. Indeed, Beijing’s actions suggest a rejection of the post war system in favor of one that is not just rejiggered to accommodate China’s growing superpowers, but that is dominated by it.

The latest data points? President Xi did not show up at COP 26; reports from Glasgow suggest the Chinese have been playing a spoiling role in the climate talks; tensions over Taiwan continue to rise; Chinese rhetoric aimed at the United States, Australia, and Europe is increasingly harsh. Not a day goes by without new reports of China asserting what it sees as its prerogatives as the soon-to-be largest economy in the world.

What’s going on? Is China’s leadership acting out of strength or weakness? Is Xi merely probing the West’s weaknesses or has he decided the time is ripe to push hard? Is war possible? Is war avoidable?

Australian Kevin Rudd has spent a considerable part of his life thinking about, working on, and negotiating with China — as a diplomat, twice as his country's prime minister, and currently as president of the Asia Society. Arguably no other western leader knows China better. Listen as he assesses where China is today, and where it wants to be tomorrow.

Politicians from around the world are in Glasgow for the 26th United Nations Conference on Climate Change. That the disastrous impacts of climate change are increasingly evident is testimony to many things, not least the practical shortcomings of the first 25 UN meetings. Why are we where we are? The science is clear; politics, much less so.

But do we know what to do? Do we have the technologies in hand to decarbonize economies in ways that are compatible with how people want to live? Can we do this?

Saul Griffith, Australian inventor and engineer—and a past winner of the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize—insists that the answer is emphatically yes. We don’t need technological miracles, he says; we have all the technology we need to transform the United States from laggard to leader in the effort to change the arc of the warming climate. And, if the United States can do it, everyone can.

Searching for "Climate change" on Google produces 1.1 billion results in less than a second. It seems almost everyone everywhere is talking about it, including the great and the good who are gathered in Glasgow at the UN's 26th Climate Change Conference. But what is actually being done?

The gap between rhetoric and action is critical. Action comes in two flavors: top-down policies that aim to decarbonize and bottom-up behaviors of ordinary people, communities, and companies. In many ways, it’s the latter where real change occurs.

Santiago Gowland, CEO of the Rainforest Alliance has spent years working with businesses, NGOs and citizens around the world to mitigate some of the biggest impacts of climate change. Listen as he discusses urgent efforts to reverse the degradation of rainforests and to create truly sustainable supply chains that are good for people as well as for the planet.

We live in a time of profound change. For anyone who doubted how fundamentally our world is changing, the global pandemic was a catastrophic proof point. Even as we in the West become more conscious of inequalities that have been part of our societal fabric for a long time, we're becoming less sure of our identities. Even as technology breaks down borders and barriers, many of us are retreating to our tribes, becoming ever more local and isolated rather than global and engaged.

If art is a window on the soul of a nation, what does ours look like? Who do we, defined loosely as the West, think we are in the sense of identity? What's our mood?

Of course, these are questions without answers or, at least, unique answers. In this episode of New Thinking for a New World, Shirin Neshat, an acclaimed Iranian visual artist who has lived and worked in the United States for decades and Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the Harper Division at HarperCollins, discuss our evolving zeitgeist.

For the first time in 75 years, the whole world is focused on the same problem and, in the process, mobilizing unprecedented political will, state authority and fiscal resources as well as relying on scientists to build evidence-based policies. How do we transfer all of that energy to addressing even the larger, more deadly challenge of climate change?

We invited Tomas Anker Christensen, Denmark’s Climate Ambassador, and Daniel Martinez-Valle, Chief Executive Officer of Orbia, a Mexico based global company, to discuss both the need and opportunity for urgent, positive creative climate activism in the wake of the pandemic. Listen as they discuss the need to develop effective partnerships between government and corporations, to find a better balance between globalism and nationalism, and to innovate solutions that assure the transformation to a low carbon economy creates, rather than destroys, jobs, growth and economic opportunity.

The Taliban's surge to power in Afghanistan is one of those events that will have repercussions for years to come. Geopolitical, strategic, military, perhaps religious, but most importantly, humanitarian. We all watched in horror as hundreds of thousands of women, men, and children tried to flee what seems likely to be a re-imposition of the Taliban's brutal pre-modern style of ruling.

Jamila Afghani, our guest this week, succeeded in getting out with her family. Jamila is an educator, a leader, and an activist. Her work to elevate the rights and improve the education of women and girls is based on her studies of Islamic law, which she believes is typically misinterpreted to give them second-class status. Jamila is also a past winner of the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.

Listen as Jamila talks about escaping the Taliban, and what she expects for her country.

Rapidly accelerating climate change is uniquely modern — but climate change is not. The planet has warmed and cooled in the past, even during mankind’s time. What can we learn from those events that might help us cope with the extremes that are our present and future? Can indigenous people who understand nature differently than most of us teach us how to cope with today’s terrifying challenges?

Our guest on this week’s New Thinking for a New World podcast, Tero Mustonen, is a climate scholar who combines indigenous knowledge with academic research. He is also a leader of the SnowChange Cooperative that works with indigenous people and climate issues throughout the Arctic, and currently the head of his town of Selkie in North Karelia, Finland.

Listen to his insights on how to promote positive change on a damaged planet.

Over the years Latin America has seen more than its share of coups, dictators, autocrats, and stolen elections. Even today, well-functioning democracies—meaning free and fair elections, independent media, strong and independent institutions, and active civil society—are the exceptions rather than the rule for too much of the region.

Why hasn't liberal democracy developed deeper roots in Latin America? Why are institutions under pressure in so many places? Why do many Latins seemingly embrace “strong man” rather than democratic solutions to their social, economic, and political problems?

Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a journalist who has covered the region for twenty years, has some answers—but also lots of worries.

The recent Taliban victory in Afghanistan and the abrupt American withdrawal are only the most dramatic evidence of a profound realignment in the politics of the Middle East.For months, former enemies have been talking to each other; the Israelis are no longer pariahs in at least some of the region; military confrontation seems to have taken a back seat—in rhetoric and, to an extent, in fact—to economic cooperation.

Iran sits at the center of this emerging new reality. Rapprochement among Arabs and peace with Israel is one thing if it is aimed at a united front against Iran, but quite another if it is about finding new ways to work with Iran on common objectives. That really would be New Thinking for a New World.

How are these developments seen in Iran? What kind of Middle East do the leaders of that country, including the newly elected president Ebrahim Raisi, want and what are they prepared to do to get it?

Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University and former chief of Iran's National Security Foreign Relations Committee, is as well positioned as anyone to answer those questions. Listen to this week's New Thinking for a New World podcast as he describes his view of what happens when the United States loses a war.