Sustain What?

Here’s the podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with three authors of a sobering, and yet slightly hopeful, paper identifying a rising number of autocracies that are followed by a sharp social and political u-turn to democratization. A rough dynamic transcript is here. The paper is here:

The hopeful part of the open-access study is this:

The analysis presents a systematic empirical overview of patterns and developments of U-Turns [from autocracy toward democracy between 1900 and 2023]. A key finding is that 52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the last 30 years. The vast majority of U-Turns (90%) lead to restored or even improved levels of democracy.

But that has to be set against the trends tracked in the sobering annual reports of the V-Dem Institute (V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy), where four of the five study authors work. In our conversation, Staffan Lindberg, the Institute’s founding director, put it this way. Listen to him or read the statement below:

This is worse than in the 1930s moving into World War II. The number of countries, 42, at the same time moving back on democracy is higher than ever before. The share of the number of countries in the world is also higher than before. The share of the world population living in countries moving back on democracy is greater than ever before. It's unprecedented the strength of this wave of autocratization.

Insert 2/11/2025 - I’ve uploaded V-Dem’s brief summarizing the new study here:

Here are the core conclusions:

• Contemporary democracies are fairly resilient to the onset of autocratization: Since 1994, 54% have not experienced backsliding. Yet, democracies rarely survive if autocratization sets in [for more than a decade].• Breakdown does not prevent a return of democracy: Roughly 50% recover shortly after a democratic breakdown in a U-turn episode.• [Early], active, stiff, and coordinated resistance against autocratization from pro-democracy actors and institutions is key to making a U-turn.

Please explore V-Dem Institute’s annual reports and its graphing tool, which provides a dynamic view of country-by-country scoring on a variety of democracy “vital signs.” Here’s the United States, and you can see the effect of Trump’s first term on the indicators:

We discuss the underlying data, the analysis on u-turns toward democracy following autocratic surges, and - most important - the societal and governmental capacities that seem essential to foster such reversals.

Breaking norms

Lindberg explains how the simplicity and vagueness of the United States Constitution is both the source of the adaptability and resilience of American democracy but also a source of deep vulnerability facing extreme disruption. The country runs on norms as much as hard-edged rules, he says. And when a figure like Trump comes in, deadset on pushing norms to the breaking point, that spells trouble:

It's very easy to tear down democracy in the U .S. if the elites want to do it. There's a famous political scientist, Giovanni Sartori, who was at Columbia University for many, many years. He said once that the American democracy works not thanks to, but despite, the American Constitution. That's almost swearing in church in the U .S., right? And he said it works only as long as the Americans wanted to work. So that in these times, I think, that’s a critical aspect of democracy in the U .S. that one needs to keep thinking about.

Fabio Angiolillo, another author, explains how public resistance, including by people in key professional sectors like journalism, is essential, as is overcoming naive discounting of the risks of autocracy in countries that haven’t experienced it:

There’s much, much more and I hope you take time to listen. And do share this post.

There are more links and other resources in the “curtain raiser” post I published on Sunday:

Independent insights

Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote an excellent three-part brief on the erosion of American democracy in 2023. Part 3 was Democratic erosion: The role of executive aggrandizement.

Key points:

* Even a legitimately elected leader can undermine democracy if they consolidate power or use government resources to debilitate their political opposition.

* Election integrity is threatened if incumbents can weaponize the provision of government services or government jobs for partisan ends.

* Given the dysfunction in Congress and the current ideological makeup of the courts, there are reasons to worry about executive aggrandizement in the United States.

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Here’s a fresh tune for these times from my songwriting side, which has been energized since I signed on to a two-decade-old annual project called February Album Writing Month (FAWM.org). There’s more below about this remarkable effort - aimed at getting participants to write 14 songs in 28 days (yes, FOURTEEN!) - including a video explainer by its founder, Burr Settles, a machine learning researcher focused on language learning at DuoLingo and, of course, on music. I hope to interview him soon.

My new song, Save Dreams for Sleeping, is still in beta mode. I’ve been trying various chord and melody approaches and instruments. But given what’s going on in the early weeks of the Trump Vance Musk administration I don’t want to hold off.

Below you can listen to another topical song by me and find links to some other off-the-news songs from #FAWM2025 and my favorite #fastfolk musician, Jesse Welles.

Insert - 1/29/26 - I used Suno to envision what this song can sound like with a bigger ensemble. I’m okay with AI-generated music for this purpose for those of us who don’t have budgets, time or other resources to pull together a band in a studio - although I WILL be recording with an ensemble later this winter.

Insert - 8/3/ 25 - Here’s the final version (chords, melody) but definitely not the final recording!

End insert

Save Dreams for Sleeping

© 2025, Andy Revkin, Written Feb. 4, 2025, updated August 3, 2025

We all hold a dream somewhere deep in our minds,

Where everything’s fair and everyone’s kind.

Flowers all blooming, no smoke in the skies.

No wars in the headlines, no tears in your eyes.

But save dreams for sleeping. It’s time to get real.

Hard workers are suffering while billionaires steal.

Young women in trouble can’t find caring hands.

House builders born elsewhere get bundled in vans.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crimes.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the fray.

A more perfect union is coming our way.

Our country needs mending, but how to begin?

With problems so tangled, no start and no end?

Begin by protecting those facing the fire.

Reach out by connecting through common desires.

One day at a time, the trust you create

Will carry us further than fighting and hate.

One stitch at a time the fabric you weave,

'Will grow ever stronger than you can believe.

So save dreams for sleeping. It’s time to get real.

Hard workers are suffering while billionaires steal.

Young women in trouble can’t find caring hands.

House builders born elsewhere get bundled in vans.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crime.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the fray

A more perfect union is coming our way.

Let me know what you think! Here’s the initial rough take from February 4.

Good news from 2044?

Here’s the other new tune from me, spurred by a FAWM prompt to write a song about a time macine. I travel to the presidential election year of 2044 and muse on what it might be like of Sasha Obama and, yes, Barron Trump, were the candidates. (I doubt either will run but 2044 is the first year Barron Trump would be eligible.)

It’s called “Good News from 2044?” and is also still a work in progress, as you can clearly hear! The lyrics etc. are here. This is a 60-second snippet. The full song is on YouTube.

The world needs more “Fast Folk”

Most of my songs are not straight off the news. I am not remotely like the amazing songwriting machine Jesse Welles, who seems to pump out several topical tunes a week and has hand built a significant following.

But songwriting, for me, is an extension of my wider philosophy of using all possible skills and media when pursuing some goal. Given the state of the world, it’s been gratifying to get into this mode, which I call “fast folk,” drawing on a movement that began in and around New York City (and a couple other cities) from the early 1980s into the early 2000s. I see Welles as reviving this form, as I noted around the election.

In 1999, I wrote a New York Times feature about the Fast Folk movement centered on a core leader, Jack Hardy. Here’s my gift paywall-free link. ''The whole idea was to do it fast,'' Hardy explained to me. ''You could hear a song at an open mic or songwriters' meeting and two weeks later it was being played on the radio in Philadelphia or Chicago. It was urgent, exciting. It was in your face.''

Writers met each week in Hardy’s Greenwich Village walkup to test drive their latest compositions for peers. It was far more an acid bath than a soothing circle. Some heralded alumni include Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin. Steve Forbert, John Gorka, Lucy Kaplansky, and Christine Lavin.

The effort resulted in Fast Folk Musical Magazine and a series of recordings that ended up released by Smithsonian Folkways.

I hung out at Hardy’s sessions off and on, tossing in a song or two on occasion in the late 90s. But my tunes were a bit too literal and conventional to get big thumbs-up responses.

The more of this the better, and that’s why the annual FAWM monthlong songwriting slam is so great. There are thousands of participants, and the songs range across every possible genre and theme. Explore away!

Here’s Burr Settles describing this year’s FAWM push:

Given that I don’t have a day job now, financial support is appreciated if you can afford to help keep Sustain What going and open to all.

I’ll wager that most of you have already heard or read Ezra Klein’s powerful audio “Don’t Believe Him” manifesto examining Trump’s take on Steve Bannon’s longstanding “flood the zone” strategy designed to overwhelm media and institutional capacity to convey and challenge his unfolding demolition derby presidency.

If not, here’s the captivating opening. But it’s vital to get past the initial statement about Bannon’s strategy.

In his piece, Klein notes Trump is already getting caught up in his own flood tides, with initial overreaching steps already facing legal setbacks and more resistance likely.

That may add up and stall Trump out in the long run, but in the short run substantial human harm is unfolding. Read Nicholas Kristof today for the impacts at the US Agency for International Development: The World’s Richest Men Take On the World’s Poorest Children.

After watching Klein, I wondered what my old friend Randy Olson - a brutally honest communication strategist - would think about how the wide-field “flooding the zone” strategy relates to Trump’s superskill - holding to an almost primally simplistic story line.

Listen to our pop-up Sustain What chat above and/or please share this post or share the webcast on X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube.

Olson began his professional life as a marine biologist, shifted to filmmaking and now mainly works with science-based organizations to improve their impact through refining their narrative strategies. He’s produced a batch of books that amount to workouts at what he calls The Narrative Gym.

Here are just a few of the books and other references Olson cited or recommended in our conversation:

* I brought up a new study showing a pattern of u-turns toward healthier democracy after autocrats take and then lose power (I’m planning a chat with the authors); Randy countered with a sobering December 2016 New York Times column by Eduardo Porter referencing The Great Leveler, a book by Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, who found:

From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality. There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s not pretty: violence.

* He noted the relationship of the zone flooding strategy to the “Gish Gallop,” which emerged from the creationism arguments of Duane Gish.

* Read The Economics of Attention - Style and Substance in the Age of Information, by Richard A. Lanham.

* Read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In the short run, you might read the 2017 Guardian op-ed by Postman’s son Andrew Postman: “My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World.”

* Read Gary Keller’s bestseller The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results, or watch the scene in the 1991 film “City Slickers” when the crusty cowboy played by Jack Palance tells Billy Crystal’s character about the importance of pursuing “one thing.”

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Here’s one of my earlier Sustain What chats with Randy:

Is science communication really worse than it was 100 years ago? Can simplicity help?

Click here for my Randy Olson coverage in The New York Times.

Here’s the podcast / webcast version of my talk with Tom Kalil, who’s moved from advising two presidents on science and technology policy to building Renaissance Philanthropy, a consultancy for wealthy people who want to help fill funding and capacity gaps to help science serve society and sustainability.

We talked about that work and also about the challenges and some possibilities as the second Trump presidential term gets into gear.

Here’s the curtain raiser with lots of relevant links:

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This is the podcast version of the Sustain What discussion I just had with the relentless clean-energy optimist, investor and evangelist Michael Liebreich. Key sections are on the need to switch metrics for success from kilowatt/hours to energy services; the ethics of focusing decarbonization on the most carbonized nations; the potential for energy-hungry AI giants to help United States regions revive wider grid reliability and clean-energy sourcing; and the possibility of having constructive conversations on sustainable energy abundance with the soon-to-be Trump Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

Here’s the curtain-raiser post with all the background!

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Here’s the video and audio podcast of my #SustainWhat show offering a valuable update on trends in emissions of heat-trapping methane and emerging science showing the tropics are the dominant driver of the recent rise in the flows of this potent greenhouse gas. Listen and share and weigh in. Background on my guests along with a batch of relevant links are in the “curtain raiser” post below.

Here are some additional sources we touched on in the conversation that weren’t in my initial post:

* Human activities now fuel two-thirds of global methane emissions (Global Carbon Project, R B Jackson et al 2024 Environ. Res. Lett. 19 101002)

The distribution of emission changes from 2000 to 2020 by latitude emphasizes the tropics, which contribute an estimated ∼60%–70% of the total global change over the last two decades for both approaches (BU: 45 [29–68] Tg CH4 yr−1; TD: 36 [6–47] Tg CH4 yr−1) (table 2). Mid-latitudes are responsible for the additional 30%–40% increase in global emissions; in contrast, emissions from higher latitudes (60–90°N) are estimated to be stable or to have decreased slightly, attributable to slightly decreasing anthropogenic emissions (table 2).

* Microbes, not fossil fuels, are behind recent methane surge - Climate.gov staff, Oct. 29, 2024

* Maine Farmers Receptive to Seaweed Feed - Survey highlights receptiveness of organic dairy farmers to feeding methane-reducing feeds

* Atmospheric methane removal may reduce climate risks (Sam Abernethy and Robert B Jackson, Environmental Research Letters, April 12, 2024)

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This talk is the latest iteration of what I’ve learned and unlearned through 40 years of reporting and conversation wrangling around the intertwined challenges of building a safer human relationship with the climate system and with energy.

My focus, echoing my goals in these dispatches, was conveying how to get beyond amorphous labels like sustainability and climate emergency by asking productive questions, starting with “Sustain what?”

Watch or listen above and share this post, or watch and share on YouTube:

I gave the talk for the Jay Heritage Center, a nonprofit group on a historic estate once owned by John Jay, one of America’s Founding Fathers and its first Supreme Court Chief Justice. The estate is a refuge for people and wildlife tucked between the busy 1-95 corridor through Westchester County, N.Y., and Long Island Sound. The center is working to make the park into what it calls an “educational campus, hosting innovative and inclusive programs about American history, historic preservation, social justice, and environmental stewardship.”

In a story for the Rye Record, reporter Jacqui Wilmot nicely summarized my core point:

While early climate reporting focused on the science and data, he said, he came to recognize the need to go beyond the numbers and engage communities in dialogue. He seeks out conversations that transcend political divides, looking to find common ground and practical ways forward on climate change….

“How do you manage a complexity monster like climate change?” Revkin asked. “You break it into parts. Shouting ‘climate emergency’ is vague for most people, unless you can break it down into actionable steps. Moving beyond traditional storytelling means encouraging productive conversations and empowering communities to act, adapt, and build resilience together.”

Please watch and weigh in - and share this post of course to grow our community and help others learn how to tame, if not defeat, the climate “complexity monster.”

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Take a mental break and do tell me how you stay sane and centered given the turbulence of this political and societal moment and the tough path ahead?

For me - along with our dogs, cooking, carpentry, hikes and the like - there’s always music. (Read my post explainng that side of my life if you haven’t already.)

This new song of mine, “After the Roaming,” was inspired by a melody composed by fellow student Kathy O'Rourke during our current songwriting workshop at Bagaduce Music in Blue Hill, Maine. (We were each tasked by the teacher, George Emlen, to create a couple of simple melodies and then were asked the following week to write lyrics to a melody other than our own.)

The lyrics are below.

Life’s a very fine line right now

I’m planning to pull together this tune and a batch of my recent original songs into my first album since my debut recording in 2013, “A Very Fine Line.” That tune, I realize, is also highly relevant given that one line is as follows:

It’s a very fine line between loony and sane.A very fine line between a loss and a gain.A very fine line between pleasure and pain.Most of your life you spend walking a very fine line.People you think are a genius are this far from bent.President blows an election by half a percent.We all know love hurts but we try it again and again.We know that the line between love and despair is so thin.

Chip in via the subscription box here if you want to help support the musical part of what I do, as well:

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Here’s “After the Roaming.” Snag an audio download at Revkin.Bandcamp.com or share the video version on YouTube below.

After the Roaming

© 2024, Andrew Revkin

I’ve fished the ocean, and I’ve plowed the ground.

I’ve toppled timber and rambled around.

But in all my roaming, two things I can’t find:

A loving companion and true peace of mind.

A loving companion and true peace of mind.

When a lad leaves his home to go out on his own

His work and his friends are his life.

But the job and the beer in the end bring no cheer

Compared to the arms of a wife.

So I’ll sell my boat, drop the plow and the axe.

I’ll woo a sweet woman and finally relax.

After all of that roaming, two things will be mine:

A loving companion and true piece of mind.

A loving companion and true piece of mind.

UPDATED 10/28 9 am - As I’ve written before, no real progress on the issues I explore here on Sustain What is possible without sustaining democracy and moving past racism and hate, so I had to cover tonight’s hate-filled Trump “rally.”

As Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event was getting into gear on Sunday afternoon, I reached out to Marshall Curry, an Academy-Award winning film director.

I was hoping to interview him because in 2017 he made a stunning seven-minute documentary called “A Night at the Garden” built with rediscovered film footage of the February 1939 rally at the venue organized by the German American Bund, a pro-Hitler organization that was inflaming passions here in the years before the United States entered World War II.

It turned out Curry was in line outside the Garden amid thousands of MAGA-hatted Trump fans.

Curry was there shooting a documentary following the work of a major magazine that had two journalists in the hall (details can’t be released yet). Once he was in the building, in between hate-filled speeches from the podium, we were able to connect by phone. I’ve posted the conversation above and you can also watch and share it on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter.

I got to know Curry starting in 2011, when I wrote for The New York Times about his “brutally neutral” film (my description) centered on the life of an Earth Liberation Front arsonist environmentalist and the federal prosecutor who pursued the group for years.

In our conversation Curry stresses that he doesn’t see Trump as a Nazi, but did find the level of vitriol in the hall deeply chilling - and at a level far beyond what he’s seen in even the most passionately anti-Trump Democrats.

As he expalined:

I still don’t think Trump is a Nazi but I do think he’s a demagogue and I do think he uses a lot of these same tactics demagogues have used for thousands of years – to kind of stir people up against each other and grab power in the process.

Please do listen and weigh in with your thoughts.

I watched the first hour or so of warmup acts and was appalled at several points, particularly by Rudolph W. Giuliani’s vile diatribe lumping all Palestinians - including the “good people” - in one unwelcome boat.

I hope that any voters in swing states whose prime concern is the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people drop any plans to skip voting for Kamala Harris.

In the meantime, Fox News had a very different impression of the “historic rally.”

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This is the podcast version of my Sustain What show on an illuminating Washington Post story on issues and insights around the newsmaking and much-cited “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” assessments by NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I’ve been deeply impressed with Harry Stevens’ reporting on climate at the Washington Post in his Climate Lab columns. He’s outdone himself with a big new analysis of the insights and issues around the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s much-covered tally of “billion dollar weather and climate disasters” from extreme climate events. Gift link: http://wapo.st/3YiJgaz. The key takeaways are:

* The tracking project is valuable but there are lots of important questions about how the disasters are measured and compiled.

* Frequent efforts by elected officials, activists and climate-centric journalists to use the surge in billion-dollar disasters as evidence of human-driven climate change have no solid basis in data.

We were joined by Jessica Weinkle, a researcher at the interface of climate and society at the University of North Carolina, Wilmigton. She’s writing up a storm on Substack on her Conflicted dispatch and on Breakthrough Journal. In a recent Breakthrough Institute post on the expanding bull’s eye of vulnerable development in coastal North Carolina, she included just one of countless visuals demonstrating that humans are worsening climate risk far faster on the ground than they are through the heat-trapping influence of greenhouse gases on the global climate:

Please watch or listen here and share our discussion on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or the recorded stream on X at @revkin.

Here’s the “curtain raiser” post from this morning:

Since I left my gig at Columbia University, I’ve been fully independent. If you like what I’m doing with Sustain What, consider becoming a paid subscriber.