Sustain What?

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 activist Rebecca Solnit

* the University of Maine paleoecologist and masterful communicator Jacquelyn Gill

* the Clark University climate geographer and IPCC report lead author Edward Carr

* (Thelma Young Lutunatabua, who is book co-editor with Solnit and a digital storyteller and activist, couldn’t join from Fiji because of family duties but I’ll have her on soon!)

I really like seeing the faces in these conversations and if that’s your preference, too, you can watch (and please share!) this Sustain What show on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube…

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 had been turned back by police. But no one who cares about democracy, Indigenous rights or environmental protection should rest easy.

Most of my time in Brazil 34 years ago was spent roaming the Amazon rain forest, researching the life, assassination and legacy of Chico Mendes for my first book, The Burning Season. Mendes, raised in the forest, was a rubber-tree tapper and union organizer who became an international figure leading efforts to stem a rising tide of deforestation and violence driven by largely-lawless cattle ranching and developers. He was killed on December 22, 1988, by a shotgun blast fired by the son of a rancher enraged by the success of the rubber tapers’ nonviolent blockades of chainsaw crews and court victories.

Mendes, like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,, was a socialist and the campaign to save the forest, then as now, was seen by patriotic “ruralistas” as an assault on the national imperative to develop roadless, resource-rich frontiers.

The Mendes case led to changes in Brazilian law and rain forest governance that cut the murder rate on the country’s farflung resource frontiers and reduced what had been a far more dramatic surge in forest destruction that anything in recent years.

Conflicting visions of the Amazon frontier

But Brazilians still have two starkly different visions of what the vast Amazon region should be — with forest dwellers and environmentally-attuned urbanites siding with international conservationists, but many others seeing an undeveloped territory needing taming and exploitation. Bolsonaro’s “beef, Bible, bullet” appeal to rural Brazilians largely played on the latter sentiment.

In my book, I propsed that the Amazon is to most Brazilians what Alaska is to lower-48 Americans — a distant abstraction tuned to fit one’s personal politics.

Among his first acts in his new term in office, Lula issued decrees aimed at curbing mining in Indigenous reserves and deforestation in Amazonia and the Cerrado region. As Mongabay reported, he also created a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples as one step to fulfill a campaign plege “to combat 500 years of inequality.”

But gains won long ago through peaceful resistance and blood, and now through Lula’s acts, remain fragile.

As André Schröder reported for Mongabay in November, “Bolsonaro won in the majority of the 256 municipalities in the Arc of Deforestation, which accounts for about 75 percent of the deforestation in the Amazon, as well as in Novo Progresso, in Pará, where ranchers, loggers and land-grabbers orchestrated a significant burning of deforested areas in 2019.”

Economic realities in the Amazon still favor ranching over rubber, as a recent Associated Press story datelined in Mendes’s home town attests. The story charts the allure of livestock even within the protected reserve named for Mendes. That widespread appeal of cattle as a cash reserve was conveyed to me by one rancher this way during my reporting in 1989: “Scratch the skin of a rubber tapper and you’ll find a rancher.”

When The Burning Season was published in 1990, I made the rounds of TV and radio shows. Here was my interview with Today Show host Deborah Norville. I brought along one of the rubber shoes tappers made from the latex they harvested. (Some residents of Acre, the state where Mendes lived and died, have built businesses making and selling modern lines of latex shoes.)

But one interview stood out – my hourlong conversation with the legendary historian, labor champion and radio host Studs Terkel. I won’t add a transcript of our chat becuase you really can’t appreciate these conversations without hearing Terkel’s melliflluous voice and feeling the intensity of his focus.

Chicago’s WFMT Radio Network and the Chicago History Museum have posted an archive of hundreds of Terkel’s four and a half decades of interviews. (The Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities supported the effort.)

The full archive is at studsterkel.org. Sift by theme. For the environment, you’ll find conservation leaders like Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough and the writers Barry Lopez and Alexander Cockburn (also on the Amazon). But you’ll also hear from workers unprotected by a union describing woeful conditions at a Hanes shirt factory.

I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did halfway back through my 66 years.

I also encourage you to listen to the magical converastion on life, faith and death that took place in 2004 when On Being host Krista Tippett turned the tables and interviewed Terkel near the end of his extraordinary life.

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 earlier post has the rough transcript (also on Trint here), with links to relevant info added:

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 for the platform’s vast trove of real-time data - generated through the flow of thousands of tweets a second around the world - to be harnessed by companies, journalists, researchers or government agencies through its APIs - application programming interfaces.

His prime focus, before and during his time at the company, was improving monitoring and response to extreme weather events. (He was at a smaller firm, Gnip, in Boulder, Corado, that was acquired by Twitter in 2014.)

In a tweet on November 21, Daniel K. Pearson, who runs efforts to modernize U.S. Geological Survey water management services, described just one of myriad applications of Twitter data that protect the public:

We run two real-time flood and rain accounts for @USGS on Twitter. @USGS_TexasFlood and @USGS_TexasRain are both at risk. They have been providing updates to the public since the devastating Memorial Day floods in 2015, and thru Harvey… a testament to this tech. #TwitterForGood

Moffitt quit Twitter on November 18th amid the upheaval and deep cuts initiated by Musk, but has not remotely given up on the platform’s potential to build resilience in communities around the world. In our conversation, Moffitt said he does not see any alternatives emerging any time soon.

Joining the discussion was Andrea Thompson (@AndreaTWeather), the sustainability editor at Scientific American. Andrea has been covering implications of the Twitter upheaval for emergency management. Read her latest story here: Twitter Chaos Endangers Public Safety, Emergency Managers Warn.

Moffitt hopes one point registers with Musk before he does any more damage: The capacity of Twitter’s open APIs to integrate the platform’s massive realtime data flows with apps or analysis that can save lives also makes the company money:

It's public information, as being a formerly public company, that these end points drive, through partnerships we have with all kinds of different companies, of all different sizes nearly $400 million a year in revenue.

It's not ad revenue and it's only 10 to 15 percent of Twitter's revenue at the time. But it's very stable. It's driven by multi-year contracts. In a recession, it's not going to be affected by advertising spending going down. Our job was to go out and and work with other developers of all kinds, from academics to engineering teams at some of the biggest partners we have. But again, without that engineering engine, it was unclear to me if I would have new things to talk about.

Twitter’s heart is its people

The “engineering engine” Moffitt described is people - a companywide network of coders and information architects and others that has been deeply damaged by Musk’s abrupt staff cuts.

[Insert - Joe Bak-Coleman, an associate research scientist at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at the Columbia School of Journalism, wrote an excellent Scientific American article explaining how Musk’s creditable approach to building a rocket business is a bad fit for an information business.]

Moffitt said his team (most, like him, based in Boulder) had been working hard to advance an ever-widening array of ways for companies, scholars and scientists, and government agencies, to exploit the data Twitter use generates second by second in unfolding events like floods or storms. With Musk’s arrival, there was the prospect for some positive outcomes, he said:

Part of me was excited about, okay, we have a new management, new ownership. They seem to have a science bent. Maybe there is going to be a room here for building more things into Twitter that would make the public's use of Twitter during emergencies even easier.

But the drastic staff cuts excised the capacity to sustain this flow of new relationships and businesses. When I asked why he quit, Moffitt gave this answer:

I hope it doesn't sound cheesy, but my eight-year tenure at Twitter was really all about my colleagues and the team we have here in Boulder…. You know, I learned that of all the engineering teams that drive the features, the products, the API, the endpoints that my team supports, about 85 percent were let go in that first round. And so it's just sort of writing on the wall that without those teams building the things that I go out and talk about, that I sit down and document, that I wasn't sure of the future I would have or my team would have in that type of environment. That's really the main reason.

Nothing like Twitter

Andrea Thompson said that people working in a wide range of positions in emergency preparedness and response had a uniform sense of concern:

Every every one I talked to said, you know, there is nothing like Twitter. It is it has become, for better or worse, integrated into the way we communicate with the public in these situations.

Moffitt added that there’s still enormous potential for this capacity of Twitter to be employed at every level of government [I’ve streamlined the language here a bit]:

A small emergency management office in some county somewhere could work with partners that made their software platforms available at nonprofit-type pricing. I always kind of joke, if you hired a computer science intern for a summer, at the end of that summer, they could have built you a really useful tool for not only listening for local tweets of interest, but for automating whatever software you're using for your monitoring system.

I was planning on setting up a sort of hands-on coding workshop where you bring the computer language of your choice. And we'll sit down and and show the basics of these two things, the listening side and the publishing side. So maybe there's opportunities to still do that down the road. I do think the Twitter API was very accessible. It was free to academics. It was free as long as you're not pulling in more than a half a million tweets a month, which for a local area would be an extremely amount of tweets around any flooding or hurricanes. So we had a lot of unique characteristics that really is a low barrier to entry

I said I’d be happy to explore how my communication initiative at Columbia might help.

A key to Twitter’s unique value and growth, he said, remains the open interfaces that allow users to seek patterns in the flow and put them to use.

I can't believe the APIs themselves would be let go. Again, they drive some significant revenue and they really help expand the reach of Twitter. With this toolkit, you can build all kinds of amazing things…. The use cases are endless, and these APIs just represent the basic building blocks of building these types of things. What I love about Twitter is, whatever interest you have or community you want to build, you know, it can be a really useful tool. Mine was flood warning. I jumped in and was like, oh, of course Twitter is a tool for this.

We explored whether any tool might emerge that has this global-to-local sensory-system capacity and is insulated from the whims of a billionaire owner. Having written about the metaphor of cathedral building in pondering sustainability, I offered a quirky thought, noting that Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame has poked into the social media arena with WT Social (Wiki Tribune Social). Listen here and tell me what you think:

You listen as a podcast or watch this Columbia Climate School Sustain What conversation here: Can the Public Value of Twitter be Sustained There or Replicated Elsewhere?

There’s a rough Trint transcription of our conversation here. If more folks choose a paid subscription to Sustain What, I can ponder hiring someone to turn around smooth transcripts!

To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

There’s lots more background, including links Moffitt assembled to an amazing set of posts on Twitter’s use in emergencies, in my previous post here:

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 transcript on Trint. If you become a financial supporter, you can help me hire an assistant to help with some of the production work.

The conversation centers on issues and options related to humanity topping the 8 billion mark in its developmental journey, as calculated by the United Nations. My guests dig in on the vital need to improve the prospects for girls, young women and migrants to shape more sustainable environmental and societal outcomes later in the century.

Guests:

Joe Chamie, a consulting demographer who is a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, "Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters." Read his Inter Press columns here, including his look at the 8 billion threshold and unsubstantiated forecasts of calamitous population implosion.

Céline Delacroix, director of the FPEarth.org project of the Population Institute and adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Health Sciences.Charles Kabiswa, executive director of Regenerate Africa, a nonprofit organization working to rebuild deteriorated social, ecological, health and economic systems to benefit people, nature and the climate across Africa.Terry McGovern, professor and chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and the director of the Program on Global Health Justice and Governance at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.Kathleen Mogelgaard, President and CEO of the Population Institute, an international non-profit organization that seeks to promote universal access to family planning information, education, and services. Read her recent opinion piece with William Ryerson in The Hill.

I’m posting some related thoughts in a separate dispatch and will add the link here.

I’m still eager to gauge how many of you prefer audio content to written output - and how best to integrate all of that in Sustain What. Please let me know what you do, and don’t want.

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 the activism-focused sociologist Dana Fisher (@fisher_danar) of the University of Maryland along with the sociologist Robb Willer (@robbwiller) of Stanford University (an author of an important paper on the “activist’s dilemma”) and Margaret Klein Salamon (@climatepsych), executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, a top bankroller of soup tossers. We were also joined by longtime performance activist “Reverend” Billy Talen.

Sparks flew but civility ultimately ruled, and some important insights emerged. Here’s a rough transcript via Trint. If more folks choose a paying subscription, I can hire someone to help produce clean ones quickly.

To learn more and weigh in on the value and downsides of in-your-face activism, read my Sustain What post with details on this discussion.

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 Archibong, a Barnard College economist focused on African development and perspectives on climate and energy policy. The session will be hosted by longtime climate journalist Andy Revkin, the founding director of the Initiative on Communication & Sustainability of the Columbia Climate School. Student nominated representatives from Teachers College will have an opportunity to engage the panel with their questions on climate action and learning.



Links to bios and more information are here:

https://j.mp/chomskyclimate



This special Sustain What segment is organized by the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School and the Teachers College Program in Adult Learning and Leadership.



It is hosted by Andy Revkin, founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia Climate School.

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 Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty – a community focused on making the most out of inconveniently murky reality.



We’ll examine how to assess and communicate effective policies and practices in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, today’s turbulent political landscape, development economics and climate change.



The discussion features David G. Groves of the Rand Corporation; Alejandro Poiré, dean of the School of Government and Public Transformation at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City and a former secretary of governance in the administration of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón; Julie Rozenberg, an economist with the World Bank Sustainable Development Group.



As always your host is Andy Revkin, a journalist with 35 years on the climate and calamity beat who now heads the Earth Institute Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University.



Learn more about the Initiative here: http://sustcomm.ei.columbia.edu



Send show feedback and ideas: http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback



Learn more about the 2020 meeting of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty: http://deepuncertainty.org



Follow our guests



David G. Groves: https://www.rand.org/about/people/g/groves_david_g.html

Alejandro Poiré: https://twitter.com/AlejandroPoire

Julia Rozenberg: https://twitter.com/julierozenberg

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 world for future generations.

Speakers:

Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His latest book is The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World. His previous international bestsellers, including Empathy, The Wonderbox and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages.

Kate Raworth is a renegade economist focused on making economics fit for 21st-century realities. She is the creator of the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries, and co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab. Her internationally best-selling book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist has been translated into over 20 languages and has been widely influential with diverse audiences, from the UN General Assembly to Pope Francis to Extinction Rebellion.

Andrew Revkin has written on climate change and other environmental challenges for nearly 40 years, mostly for The New York Times and now at revkin.bulletin.com. He founded the Columbia Climate School's Initiative on Communication and Sustainability in 2019 and runs a popular webcast series, Sustain What, clarifying paths to progress on urgent challenges where complexity and consequence collide. He has won most of the top awards in science journalism as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.

This conversation is part of the Entre Nous series organized in partnership with the The American Library in Paris and Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

This conversation was held as a Zoom video conference on Mon, September 20, 2021 | 1:30 pm (New York) | 7:30 pm (Paris) | 6:30 pm (London)

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 military hospital tweeting, "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life."