Sustain What?

October 2, 2020

Thomas Homer-Dixon, the bestselling author of The Upside of Down and other books exploring pathways through complexity, joins Sustain What host Andy Revkin and two special guests in a bracing discussion of the themes of his latest work: "Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril." (https://commandinghope.com/)



The guests are:



- Susan Cox-Smith, a partner and futurist at Changeist, a consultancy and training organization that curates and creates "experiences that stretch strategic thinking, materialize the new, and connect with people about what comes next." She's a contributing editor of the new book "How to Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange." Learn more at http://changeist.com



- Michael Garfield, a philosopher, musician, painter and writer who blogs for Long Now Foundation and hosts the Future Fossil podcast.



His Long Now posts: https://blog.longnow.org/0author/michaelgarfield/

Future Fossils: https://shows.acast.com/futurefossils/episodes



Homer-DIxon sees three paths to bending humanity's curve away from a long descent after the last century of zooming progress. As he writes"



"At this crucial moment in humanity’s history, I argue, three changes are essential to keep us from descending into intractable, savage violence.



First, we need individually to better understand how and why we see the world the way we do and what makes other people’s views sometimes so different from ours. Second, instead of passively accepting a dystopian image of what will come tomorrow, we need to actively create together from our diverse perspectives a shared story of a positive future — including a shared identity as “we” — that will help us address our common problems and thrive. And, finally, we need to fully mobilize our extraordinary human agency to produce that future."



More on the book and his research and other output:

http://homerdixon.com

A pandemic and attendant economic crisis rock the world along with political and social turmoil intensified by an overheating information environment and overheating climate. What's a solution-oriented human being to do?



Slow down and stretch your time scales, according to three experienced analysts of this extraordinary moment in human history.



Join the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin, the philosopher Roman Krznaric, the journalist and resilience expert Bina Venkataraman and the filmmaker John D. Sutter in a discussion of ways to find meaning by stepping back from the urgency of now.



Krznaric's new book is "The Good Ancestor - How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World."



Learn more about him and the book here:

https://www.romankrznaric.com/good-ancestor



Bina Venkataraman is the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. She previously taught in MIT’s program on science, technology and society, directed policy initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT and served as senior advisor for climate change innovation in the Obama White House.



She is the author of "The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age," named one of Amazon’s best books on business and leadership of 2019.



Learn more here: http://writerbina.com/



John D. Sutter, formerly a climate-focused CNN video journalist, has embarked on an epic “slow journalism” project, a film looking at climate change by visiting four dispersed communities every five years through 2050. He is working on the first installment, “Baseline: part 1." The name draws on the “shifting baselines” concept that each generation can miss momentous environmental change unfolding over long time scales.



https://www.baselinefilm.com/

In this webcast, former senior intelligence and national security officers explore headlines noting that intelligence reports provided to the Trump White House had laid out the likelihood of a pandemic with unnerving clarity - and one even noted worrisome signs of a rapidly spreading virus in Wuhan in November (ABC: https://bit.ly/covid19wuhanintell)



But the challenge for this or any administration is not awareness as much as prioritization, as former National Intelligence Council analyst Rod Schoonover put it in a previous Sustain What conversation:



“In my world in the intelligence community, I was often very proud to be in one of the only parts of the government that either had the platform or the freedom to clearly state some of the risks. In the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, it lays out language that’s very, very, eerily prescient of this moment. But it also landed on, I think, page 21. So, yes, it’s a risk, but we clearly don’t have it calibrated quite right.”



http://j.mp/coronaschoonover



In a fresh chat with Schoonover and Alice Hill - a former National Security Council official and biodefense expert now at the Council on Foreign Relations - we explore what will be needed for an administration with any political orientation to do better.

Air Date: August 6, 2021

DESCRIPTION: In this special live Sustain What webcast, join host Andy Revkin of the Columbia Climate School and http://revkin.bulletin.com in a brisk solution-focused discussion with top experts of pathways to risk reduction in the world’s hundreds of crowding deluge danger zones.



Humans are profoundly heating the climate and changing storm patterns through a surge in emissions of heat-trapping gases and other pollution. But there’s also been a simultaneous surge of settlement in zones prone to flooding -- producing what some geographers call an “expanding bull’s eye” of exposure to climate-related threats like floods. And of course the poorest and most marginalized populations are always hurt most.



A pioneering study, published in Nature on Wednesday, has greatly raised estimates of population growth in flood-affected regions and offers sobering projections of much more flood exposure through 2030 without big changes in policy at every scale. Luckily the work, sifting millions of high-resolution satellite images, has also produced a new open-access tool, the Global Flood Database (http://global-flood-database.cloudtostreet.ai), that offers officials at all levels, the financial world and communities a clearer view of the exposure they’ve created and a chance to shape safer development paths in the critical years ahead.



Read Andy Revkin's story about the paper: http://j.mp/bulletinflood



GUESTS:



Beth Tellman, Cloud to Street Chief Science Officer and lead author of the Nature paper



Jean-Martin Bauer, Senior Digital Advisor for the UN World Food Programme and former WFP Country Director of Republic of the Congo



Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development



Simon Young, senior director for climate and resilience at the global advisory company Willis Towers Watson (he has been building new types of insurance to respond to floods and other extreme events around the world including Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands)

Aired: June 2, 2021

A special Sustain What episode with two scientists, a journalist and a songwriter offering ways to navigate turbulence, polarization and disinformation with the fewest regrets.



Join Andy Revkin of Columbia’s Climate School with Carnegie Mellon philosopher Andy Norman; solution-focused journalist Amanda Ripley; Columbia University psychologist and conflict dissector Peter Coleman, and songwriter and storyteller Reggie Harris.



Send feedback and ideas for future shows:

http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback



Here's more on our guests:



- Peter T. Coleman, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, will discuss lessons from his new book, “The Way Out - How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.”



Coleman holds a joint appointment at Teachers College and the Earth Institute and directs two research centers. He is also the author of “Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement” (2014) and “The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts” (2011), among other books.



He says “The Way Out” is “about why we are stuck in our current cultural riptide and what we can do to find our way out. It will explain how patterns of intractable polarization can and do change, and offer a set of principles and practices for navigating and healing the more difficult divides in your home, workplace and community.”



Learn more: https://thewayoutofpolarization.com/



- Reggie Harris is a longtime folk singer and songwriter, storyteller and educator who has worked and sung for racial understanding, human rights and justice for decades. He’ll speak about his experiences at the interface of love and hate, Black and White and maybe sing a song or two.



He describes his new album, “On Solid Ground,” as a “call for personal and national grounding in the explosion of racial and civil unrest and the growing worldwide death spiral that was 2020.”



Explore Harris’s music, writing and activities: https://reggieharrismusic.com/



- Andy Norman teaches philosophy and directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. He says his focus is studying how ideologies short-circuit minds and corrupt moral understanding and developing tools that help people reason together in more fruitful ways.



Norman will describe insights offered in his new book, “Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."



Learn more: https://andynorman.org/



- Amanda Ripley is a solutions-focused journalist and bestselling author who has become a champion of a new style of journalism sifting less for sound bites and more for pathways to insight amid complexity.



Her new book is “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.”



Here’s Ripley’s summary of this concept: “When we are baffled by the insanity of the ‘other side’—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. That’s what ‘high conflict’ does. People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.”



Explore: https://amandaripley.com/high-conflict



Sustain What, produced and hosted by Andy Revkin, is a series of conversations seeking progress where complexity and consequence collide.

Air Date: December 23, 2020

Earlier this year, the famed climate-focused novelist Kim Stanley Robinson told Columbia students: “I’ve been pushing myself to write utopian narratives; that gets weirder as we continue on the course that we’re on."



In this special intergenerational Sustain What conversation, Robinson returns to Columbia (virtually this time) to explore the themes in his sweltering, jarring new novel “Ministry for the Future” with the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin and several advocates for the future – including the 15-year-old climate change campaigner Alexandria Villaseñor and Carolyn Raffensperger, a lawyer who was an early leader of calls for "a legal guardian for the future."



Information on the book is here: http://j.mp/2WnLeXy



Unlike Robinson's previous novels set after profound climate change have set in over generations or centuries , this one begins a mere 30 years in the future. As Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone recently summarized, "It’s a trip through the carbon-fueled chaos of the coming decades, with engineers working desperately to stop melting glaciers from sliding into the sea, avenging eco-terrorists downing so many airliners that people are afraid to fly, and bankers re-inventing the economy in real time in a desperate attempt to avert extinction."  



Several other students will join to ask questions, final exams and papers allowing. Students and faculty are encouraged to submit questions or comments in advance.



Email [email protected]



More on our guests:

Alexandria Villaseñor, who turned 15 last spring, was one of the first, and youngest, American students to build on Greta Thunberg's climate strikes and has gone on to co-found the youth-run group Earth Uprising. https://earthuprising.org/



Carolyn Raffensperger is an environmental lawyer pursuing fundamental changes in law and policy she and other experts see necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment. She is the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network.

http://sehn.org



In 2007, Andrew Revkin interviewed Raffensperger for his New York Times blog in a post asking a question she answers with a resounding yes: "Does the Future Need a Legal Guardian?" https://j.mp/futurelegalguardian



(Try the link a couple of times, like opening an old stuck door.)



More resources:

The Columbia student podcast with Robinson from February: https://j.mp/ksrgreennewdeal.



Read Goodell's captivating interview with Robinson: https://j.mp/rollingstoneKSR



To offer feedback and suggestions for Sustain What, or to find out how to support us, click here: http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback

In my 400-plus Sustain What conversations, several stand out, includng this intergenerational discussion of economic models that can fit on a finite planet. I invited Herman E. Daly, a founding force behind “steady-state economics,” to examine possible paths to less fragile global systems with Kate Raworth, whose “doughnut economics” model aims to build economic policies and metrics that put thriving ahead of growing.