Sustain What?

Snag “Wake Me up Martha,” a sonic survival guide for these crazy times, on Bandcamp today - Bandcamp Friday - when the company doesn’t take its percentage: revkin.bandcamp.com. You can listen on every conceivable platform and they’re all here: andyrevkin.hearnow.com.

Here’s the curtain raiser post that preceded this show:

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

J.A. Ginsburg, a k a Janet Ginsburg, is a business analyst and writer (and many other things) who is scouring the world for scientists and startups pursuing substitutes for the materials societies have long depended on — but that are in short supply because of bottlenecks like the one created by President Trump’s war on Iran.

I urge you to sign up for her Substack project, which is the learning journey leading to an eventual book.

But I also urge you to give yourself a dose of optimism and excitement by listening to our conversation above!

Here are links to the work of just a few of the companies or sectors she mentioned (I’m adding a paywall break as a reminder that Sustain What takes work; I’m going to take it down after publication):

* Maxwell Labs - cooling with light https://mxllabs.com Here’s her description:

* Simplyfiber - fabric without spinning, weaving, sewing…

https://www.simplifyber.com

* Strongbyform - wood as technology

https://www.strongbyform.com

* Hertha Metals - getting around the China issue for steel and high-quality iron https://herthametals.com

* Enso - making better tires for EVs (which have a tire problem) https://www.ensotyres.com/en-US

* Plantd Materials - board and other products made from grasses

https://www.plantdmaterials.com

* Shellworks - plastic-free materials that behave like plastic https://shellworks.com

* On - running shoes and clothing https://www.on.com

* Colorifix https://www.colorifix.com

* Five Startups Reducing Data Center Water Consumption - “Startups are rethinking data center cooling with liquid, immersion, and closed-loop systems to reduce water consumption while supporting rising AI-driven compute demand.”

* TOCCO - you have to explore to understand this “agency” for materials sourcing and tracking. “First-hand intelligence from the materials frontier.”

https://tocco.earth

Ginsburg also mention that Trump, in essence, has created a carbon tax that is spurring all kinds of action to cut fossil fuel use. With that in mind, also read Larry Kotlikoff:

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Peter Raven, 1936 - 2026

Rhett Ayers Butler, the founder of the biodiversity-focused online news network Mongabay, has posted a marvelous tribute laying out the extraordinary life and legacy of Peter Raven, a groundbreaking botanist and fierce defender of Earth’s biological diversity who died over the weekend at age 89.

I was lucky to get to know Raven over a couple of decades as an expert source in my environmental reporting and then work with him when I joined the Executive Committee for Resaearch and Exploration at National Geographic Society, which he led at the time I joined. (Watch this video about Raven’s Hubbard Medal.) Here’s the opening to Butler’s piece:

Life on Earth is often described as a web, but for much of modern science it was catalogued as a ledger: names, specimens, distributions, relationships drawn in careful lines. Over the course of the 20th century, that ledger gave way to a more connected view. Plants and animals were no longer just entries in a system; they were participants in it, shaping one another across deep time. The implications of that shift were not merely scientific. They pointed, more directly than before, to the role of a single species—our own—in altering the terms of that participation.

Few scientists did more to define that transition, or to explain its consequences, than Peter Raven.

Peter Hamilton Raven, who died this weekend, aged 89, was among the most influential botanists of the past century. Over a career that spanned more than six decades, he combined taxonomy, evolutionary biology and conservation into a coherent body of work: to understand the diversity of life, and to argue for its preservation with a clarity that was unusual among scientists of his generation. PLEASE READ THE REST:

So many greats from the early generation of conservation leaders are gone, including Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy.

But so many more leaders are emerging. To understand that, and to feel Raven’s mix of deep knowledge, puckish humor and trenchant analysis, I encourage you to watch the Sustain What conversation above, which was recorded in May 2021 but is eternally relevant. I introduced Raven to two younger generations of botanist: Angelica Patterson, who calls herself the “shotgun scientist” because that’s the tool she uses to collect the flowering and fruiting treetop branches that help identify a tree species; and Hilary Callahan of Barnard College.

This 2022 short documentary is also well worth your time.

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There’s no one more focused on building a future with affordable, delicious, nutritious, ethically produced food than Bruce Friedrich, a onetime PETA animal rights activist who’s co-founder and president of the Good Food Institute.

His focus is protein - in the form we know of as meat. I was very happy to get a chance to speak with him about the group’s work advancing alternative meats (whether plant based or built in the lab) and his new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food―and Our Future.

Please watch or listen above and share this post or the archived videos on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, or YouTube.

The mission statement of the nonpartisan nonprofit organization tightly meshes with my view of how to feed 9 billion or so people with the fewest regrets:

Billions of people around the world love meat and want to keep eating more of it. Simply ramping up business-as-usual ways of producing that meat, however, is not a viable path if we want to achieve the world’s climate, biodiversity, public health, and food security goals within the next two critical decades.

While multiple interventions will be needed, a transition toward alternative proteins—made from plants, cultivated from animal cells, or produced via fermentation—is the only one that can scale to address the demand for meat. Such a transition can dramatically reduce emissions, feed more people with fewer resources, reduce the use of antibiotics in our food system, and enable the conservation of lands and waters.

His book masterfully untangles the issues and options - technical, financial and political - that could give people the protein they need without ravaging more forest, overheating climate, threatening health or adding to the nonstop, vast and growing slaughter of our animal kin.

He describes his learning and work journeys, which started in the 1980s with reading books like Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet and work focused on poverty alleviation and food sufficiency.

He walks through the stutter-step start of the field in the last decade or so and the emerging reality that large-scale alternative-meat production is absolutely doable. It’s easy to get fooled by the slow start, he told me, adding:

“Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University, said in 1906 that automobiles will never be more than a plaything for the idle rich. because they were really hard to start. They were breaking down constantly and they were really expensive. In 1908, Henry Ford solves those first two problems and puts us on the trajectory of solving the third. And 20 years later, the automobile industry was the largest industry in America. So the question is, how do we get to that 1908 moment?

Listen for the answers.

We also talked about my reporting journey on lab-grown meat, as well, which started in 2008 when I proposed that cultured foie gras would seem an ideal starting point. It took a bit longer than I’d envisioned but Australian and French companies are there!

Of course the holy grail isn’t exotica like fatty liver. It’s mass production. Watch our conversation to get the latest from Friedrich on what’s needed from science, investors and nations to boost protein security and cut environmental damage for the long haul. As in so many areas, China appears to be leading the way.

Read Mitigating Risk and Capturing Opportunity: The Future of Alternative Proteins - a report by Zane Swanson, Caitlin Welsh, and Joseph Majkut for the Center for Strategic and International Studies - and Friedrich’s Foreign Policy article on how China is poised to do for alternative meats what it has already done for electric vehicles.

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Related Sustain What posts

Other voices

My vegan “solutionary” educator friend (and neighbor) Zoe Weil had Friedrich on her Solutionary Voices podcast:

David Roberts did a great climate- and energy-focused Volts chat on the future of meat with Friedrich:

Also watch Alex Crisp’s interview with Friedrich:

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On a road trip from Maine to Nashville and back, visiting our sons and other kin, my wife and I spent a couple of days back in the Hudson Valley, where I popped into the studios of Radio Kingston to speak with my old environmental-media compadre Jon Bowermaster for his Green Radio Hour show.

Bowermaster, a couple of years older than I am, has amassed an extraordinary globe-spanning body of great journalism — most of that in documentary films. His latest, “The Keeper,” is an intimate portrait of Hudson Riverkeeper John Lipscomb’s quarter-century effort to curtail pollution and revive the ecosystem along “the river that flows both ways.” (Lipscomb retired in 2024.) See a clip and more on Bowermaster’s other films below.

Radio Kingston has grown substantially since my last visit and now includes 2/47 Spanish language programming for the large immigrant community in the region.

I’d been on Bowermaster’s show many times, but this was the first time in more than a decade that I’d gotten to sit face to face with my old friend in the studio — and also the first time I was there with my guitar and bouzouki and a new album of original songs. My album, Wake Me up Martha, is launching April 30th and this was my first radio interview supporting the record. Let your favorite stations know about the album! Here’s a promotional flyer you can share.

We ranged widely in the hour, talking about how some environmental challenges (climate, ecological degradation) seem immune to even the best efforts of journalists, about the importance of truly engaging audiences, about his fine films. And we talked about my growing focus on my music.

I’m pasting some highlights below, but I hope you’ll listen to, and share, the full conversation! I’m grateful to Bowermaster and the station for allowing me to post the segment on Sustain What.

How I fell in love with blogging at The New York Times — as a way to build a conversation on complex questions; how the name of Sustain What derives from the main tool of journalists — the quetion mark — and why asking questions isn’t always a delay-seeking form of “whataboutism”:

How my journalistic and musical journeys intersected off and on — here when I wrote “Liberated Carbon” to describe the long human love affair with fossil fuels:

Why sustaining democracy has become a vital focus of my sustainability quest, and why the plasticity of the Constitution is its greatest strength, and now greatest weakness — one being exploited almost hourly by President Trump:

Bowermaster asked me for my thoughts on what Lee Zeldin has been doing at the Environmental Protection Agency. I responded with the point I made in a meme and column here awhile back:

Watch the conversation for some of my songs. And please SHARE this post. That’s really the only way we can grow the Sustain What community.

Here’s more on Bowermaster’s films, starting with “The Keeper”:

I loved “Sink or Swim - Learning to Crawl in the Maldives” because it gets at a critical issue for safety and sustainability I’ve explored before: making sure people in coastal communities can appreciate the ocean environment that surrounds them.

I love his short intimate film about The Wonder of the Bobolink, a threatened field-nesting bird with an intercontinental migratory cycle that we’ve come to love in our part of downeast Maine because they nest in hayfields near us (and are beginning to return as conservationists work with farmers to time mowing safely).

There’s so much more from Bowermaster and his team.

Thanks, Jon, for helping elevate my music side!

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This is the post-webcast post of my invigorating and unnerving conversation with Andrew Maynard and Jeffrey Abbott, the authors of a “practical guide to thriving with AI while rediscovering yourself in the process.”

The curtain raiser post is here with more background:

The more I dive into the free downloadable (and AI-uploadable) version of AI and the Art of Being Human, the more I appreciate what they’re trying to do.

But the more we talked, the more, also, I became convinced that the ungovernability of the technology, and the norms of those shaping it, pose the most existential challenge of all. Here’s a key point from Maynard:

I think there’s another challenge here as well. And that is that so much of what we’re seeing is being driven by ideology. So it’s not just making money. If you look at the big tech companies, they’re driven by people who have a very, very specific vision of the future.

And I would say in many cases, it’s a very naive vision, a very flawed vision. But it’s this vision that drives them. This is what they’re trying to build. You look at someone like Dario Amodei or Elon Musk or others; it’s not the money. It’s creating the future that somehow has got locked in their heads.

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It’s hard to stay centered on issues around sustainable development and climate policy when the fragility of nations — economicaly, politically or otherwise — is in the foreground. (Sure we should get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible as Bill McKibben and Rebecca Solnit and so many others wisely counsel in the face of the latest Gulf war. But even best-case possibilities on that track will take many years, so oil and gas are still vital.)

Without functioning democracies, forget about climate policy

That’s why I focus periodically here on the vital need to maintain the kind of political systems and norms that are vital for any progress on deeper themes. In February, 2025, I hosted a conversation with scholars at the V-Dem Institute in Sweden who, for a decade, have been charting nations’ vital signs in ways that reveal drift either toward or away from autocracy.

Their 2025 report was gloomy but focused on analysis showing that, in recent decades, countries that had moved to control by a single individual or cabal could experience u-turns back toward democracy. My first Sustain What conversation with them is here: Amid the Worst Surge Toward Autocracy in a Century, Here’s How U-Turns Toward Democracy Can Happen.

No bright spots this time in Trump’s America

In our discussion of the V-Dem Project’s 2026 report, I kept pressing Staffan Lindberg and Marina Nord for good signals, but we came up empty. The section on the United States — no surprise — is very grim. Read these nuggets, but don’t weep; get busy! Sustained civil resistance across society is an essential precursor for restoration of good governance.

Their new report, like last year’s, noted that the autocratization trend remains strong around the world and is measurably worse than in the 1930s. We discussed a range of situations, from efforts to influence the upcoming election in Hungary to questions around what comes next after the youth-driven uprising in Nepal.

I hope you’ll take time to listen, and SHARE, and let me know what you’re doing to defend humane democratic government from the local to global scale.

Here’s Lindberg describing the evidence that the current global situation is worse than the 1930s:

Thanks to those who tuned in live.

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Here’s the post-show post of my conversation with planetary-intelligence analyst Adam Frank on the roles of science and fath in human affairs, the arguments for and against humanity’s sustainability, the need for multi-generational approaches to addressing climate change and so much more.

Please listen to the full show and, as important, SHARE it. Sharing is the only way we grow the Sustain What community.

Here are a couple of highlights if you’re in a hurry. We started out talking about threats from space given the dramatic meteor explosion over the U.S. Midwest. Frank pointed to his recent Everyman’s Universe post positing that if dinosaurs, way back when, had had the planetary defense technology we are developing now, we wouldn’t be here now:

Here Frank described the vital challenge of reintegrating the human journey within the biosphere’s constraints.

Here Frank describes how he tries to use practices he learned in Buddhism and meditation to pull back from the zone-flooding dread around us: “You’re only given so many hours on this planet. So spending every moment of it in terror, you’re not helping anybody. You’re not helping the future by being freaked out 99.9 percent of the time.”

Please considering chipping in, if you can afford it, so I can justify the time it takes to do this work and keep most of the output open to all.

Thank you Aviva Rahmani, BCz, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Just in case you missed the live event, here’s my Sustain What conversation with two passionate climate communicators, both with experience in broadcast news media, pursuing distinct strategies via online video. Each has a very distinct vision of the path to action, and - as I exclaimed during the show, that’s exactly what’s needed. The climate challenge, and audiences out there, are both far too prismatic for one approach to be “right.”

My guests:

* Chase Cain, who recently left NBC News after a decade focused on climate change reporting there, has launched a YouTube channel aiming to bridge cultural gaps by highlighting stories forging closer, and more relisient, relationships between people and nature.

* Betsy Rosenberg, a former CBS radio journalist who has spent decades trying to engage audiences on the vital need to stem global warming and conserve the natural world. Her current platform, also on YouTube, is Code Green:

In our conversation, a listener on Facebook, Courtney A. Kaaz, posted this great question:

Make more desalination, hydroelectric dams, that chemically filter water, make breakwater piers that also clean the water, explain how you can use solar in a way that is actually economical in real time. All of Texas could get on board if you can give us economical, safe water and solve our toxic summer oceans, ponds and lakes.

Cain offered an answer that completely syncs with my view that often the best way to gain traction on energy and resilience choices that can improve climate outcomes doesn’t involve focusing on that grand, and divisive, thing called climate change:

I think what i think part of what [Courtney] is saying is she didn’t also say the word climate, and in a place like Texas that’s probably what’s going to reach people.

If you say climate you’ve lost the Fox News audience but we need and want the Fox News audience. I’m not saying that everything I’m going to do is devoted toward that. But I do want to create content that is accessible and as an invitation to those people.

…The Fox News audience probably spends more time in the outdoors, probably spends more time in nature than an MSNBC audience or an MSNBC audience, whatever it’s called. So they love the outdoors. They love nature. I just don’t know that they’ve connected the dots to how some of these policies are impacting the things and the places that they love. And so if we bridge that divide, then gosh, you’ve just won a huge segment of the American population, which would, I think, almost overnight flip our politics.

That closing assertion about a quick flip is pretty questionable (and Rosenberg expressed a very different view and strategy) but Cain’s core point is important.

Please watch and share the full show and weigh in.

There’s more background in the curtain raiser post that preceded the show:

And here’s my related conversation with Sammy Roth, the former Los Angeles Times climate columnist who’s moved to Substack:

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Most of you already know I’ve been writing and performing songs for 30 years, mostly hidden behind my journalism. Only a few of my tunes cross directly over into my “beat” - and none more so than “Liberated Carbon,” which I wrote as the United States invasion of Iraq played out in the early 00’s and which I included on my first album, A Very Fine Line, in 2013.

I’d first touched on how oil access delineates areas of global interest and conflict in 1991, as I explored yesterday:

But I thought it worth posting the annotated lyrics to my song as the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and American, Israeli and Iranian salvos continue, and the oil (and gas) impacts of this new Middle East war move to the foreground. Do check the footnotes!

Dear subscribers. I really would appreciate your help SHARING this post, or others, with friends or colleagues who might appreciate what I’m trying to do with Sustain What.

LIBERATED CARBON

music and lyrics © 2013 Andrew Revkin

It took a thousand generations for our species to rise.But gathering and hunting was no way to get by.We yearned to burn more than dung and sticks.Then someone came along and said, “Hey, try lighting this.”He opened up the ground and showed us coal and oil.He said, “Come liberate some carbon. It’ll make your blood boil.”Liberated carbon, it’ll spin your wheels.Liberated carbon it’ll nuke your meals.Liberated carbon, it’ll turn your night to day.Come on and liberate some carbon, babe, it’s the American way.Now I got peat swamp fossils running my TV.BP’s black label burns in my S.U.V.We can light up the planet like a Christmas tree.They say that things are getting hot but, hey, we’ve got A.C.Liberated carbon, it’ll spin your wheels.Liberated carbon it’ll nuke your meals.Liberated carbon, it’ll turn your night to day.Come on and liberate some carbon, babe, it’s the American way.Pump those electrons and that gasoline.No sweat or hurry, just turn on a machine.We sent an army to the desert to keep this country free,And to liberate some carbon, baby, for you and me…Liberated carbon it’ll spin your wheels.Liberated carbon, it’ll nuke your meals.Liberated carbon, it’ll turn your night to day.Come on and liberate some carbon, babe, it’s the American way.

There are various performances online, including with John Munson, the bass player from the Minneapolist band Semisonic, at the 2018 National Geographic Explorers Festival, and with melting ice chunks onstage at a Play for the Planet event in San Francisco.

To support my music side, you can buy my album, A Very Fine Line, on Bandcamp or buy Liberated Carbon as a single.

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