THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists. 

This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise.

Art at the End of the World is a hybrid class and public program series supported by the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art and the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, and taught by Associate Curator of Special Projects, Vero Rose Smith.

Today’s guest is Stratis Giannakouros, Director of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment at the University of Iowa.

Music was written, performed, and produced by Gabi Vanek.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

[Vero Rose Smith]: The world is ending. Again. Doomsayers and apocalyptic profits have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists. This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. I'm Vero Rose Smith your host, and this is Art at the End of the World. Today we welcome Stratis Giannakouros, the director of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment at the University of Iowa. Before coming to Iowa, Stratis served as a project manager and program director for the Julie Ann Brinkley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Before that he was assistant director at the center for sustainable communities seven for college and the sustainability outreach coordinator at Colorado State University. Stratis has a bachelor's degree in economics from Loras College and a master's degree in environmental politics and policy from Colorado State University. Our conversation was recorded on Wednesday, March 25, 2020. 

[VRS]: So if you could just introduce yourself and tell us about your current role. 

[Stratis Giannakouros]: So my name is Stratis Giannakouros and I direct the Office of Sustainability and the Environment at the University of Iowa. My role is essentially on the academic side so I'm part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and is supported by the College of Business and the College of Public Health, and our office is designed to promote the scholarship and research around sustainability and also to think of the campus as a living laboratory for sustainability. What that means is moving from thinking about problemitizing sustainability to thinking about what are the solutions our students, faculty, and staff can engage in across campus.

[VRS]: Thank you, great. And how did you get interested in this work?

[SG]: Well I started out as more of just an environmentalist back in the day and as I became more engaged in thinking about saving the environment, I realized that modern environmental thought is really - has an absence, or a missing a gap, and thinking about how societies are impacted, how individuals are impacted, and broadly thinking about the social pieces that go into why we have an environmental crisis on our hands. And so what sustainability does is it allows us to think more broadly about unequal exchange in trans-boundary impacts and how harms and benefits are unevenly distributed across the world and allow the solution to come up with the kids and allows a more human approach to thinking about why we conserve the environment what the best ways to do that so just a comprehensive view of what it means to save the environment and what it means to be part of the world in order to solve the biggest environmental crises we face. 

[VRS]: That's a lot! So how did that become a professional trajectory for you? You started as an environmentalist with seems like a pretty personal orientation to this work, so describe that path for us.

[SG]: Well actually in college I was an econ major, because I thought at the time that was going to be the best way to get a job - yeah, is majoring in economics and it's like math other things - I actually didn't study [environmental issues] a lot. I didn't take a single environmental course I when I was in college, but I spent all my time outdoors in the woods on the Mississippi River doing things that I wanted to do outside of that, so my personal interests were diverging from my education because I felt that going to college at that time meant that you should do something that's gonna get you a job and what you're interested in what you're passionate about should be separate from that. I got out I worked for a year in finance and I realized that that was a non-starter for me and I was not going to be happy sitting in a cube and kind of thinking about these esoteric problems of finance and I really wanted to be engaged in the stuff that I loved to do and so I quit my job and I went and I found an organization in Greece called Medicet. What they were doing at the time was trying to preserve the Caretta caretta loggerhead turtle of the Eastern Mediterranean. A lot of nesting beaches - some of the most important nesting beaches in the world - are located in just a few spots in the Greek islands and they were being encroached upon by development and tourism and all these things are going on that were really going to severely the impact these turtles. And so I said "Hey, I'll volunteer for a year to come there." I saved some money to volunteer for free for a year to come down and help. They wanted me to do communications. I spoke good English and also spoke good Greek and so as communications officer, I hosted different groups that came in. The BBC even did a documentary with us. We talked to the European Commission. We talked to different groups around Greece and I worked there for about eight months and finally got burned out. I ran out of money and I was very frustrated with the pace of change in Greece at that time. The Greek government was not interested in designating a marine park or diverting funds that were earmark for good work in other things and I kind of saw first hand the complexity of of what environmentalism needs and by that I guess I mean that when I went down there I had a lot of Greeks who were in these areas we were trying to protect - they called me a traitor. They said you know you're a traitor, all I have is this field or this plot of land and why shouldn't I be allowed to develop it? My kids need to eat and get an education and I need to thrive and you know you are an American who is coming down here tell me what to do and we don't listen to you so we're gonna develope anyway and no one wants you around here. And I just I just look at the trade offs in the complexity of people trying to make a living respecting barman how this stuff works and what the drivers of these problems were and when I left I was burned out but I decided that I really had to go and study this more. So I came back and for a couple years anyway I worked with that new - we started our own NGO my brother and I started a non-profit called Green Dubuque. We were working directly on impacts of climate change and got involved in sustainability from that angle. I worked on some programs at Stanford and Berkeley and then at Babson in New York City at Pace University teaching cleantech entrepreneurship. Trying to take a more expansive view of business I did a lot of work in that field. And finally I went to grad school at Colorado State University and there I went to study non environmental policy and environmental politics. And when I was there I got really heavily involved in sustainability. I worked for the School of Global Environment and Sustainability and then that kind of set me on this on this career trajectory where I started working inside universities on sustainability select from there to Luther College after I graduated. I taught for two and a half years. I taught environmental studies and then worked as the director - assistant director of the Center for Sustainable Communities. 

From there, I went to Arizona State University and I worked at a little start up that was a twenty six million dollar venture from the Walton Family Foundation that was earmarked for thinking about how universities could take the research they were doing and translate it into environmental or sustainability outcomes. The argument was that often good research is done in universities but there's not a really good mechanism for translating that research into solutions. So I worked as a project manager and program manager for for that outfit for three years. We worked in Albania and Lebanon and Jordan, we tried to spin up projects in Vietnam, and we did start here in the U. S.

I was always trying to find ways where we could take the research in university, take either a government or private partner, and figure out a way to get a project going that would make a difference for sustainability. When I was down there also started twenty different what I would call almost like like intervention programs where we would go with faculty and students to different countries around the world and try to do things like put solar panels or work on social policy. I ran them in Nepal, in Brazil, in Hong Kong, in Costa Rica, and Greece - all over the world. It was an opportunity for students to take what they learned in the classroom and translate it into these sort of real world environments. We work with cities to do this also. And then finally this opportunity at the University of Iowa opened up and I am from Iowa, I love the state of Iowa, and I'm an Iowan at heart and so I decided to come home to the university here to try to spin out some of the things that I learned in their office here where students could access internships and research. We can do interdisciplinary research with faculty, and we can have a bigger footprint in the state of Iowa around sustainability. That's kind of how I've gotten here that's that I guess maybe the short version.

[VRS]: Oh my goodness, that's an incredible story. So I'd like to know a little bit more about your one year in finance - was there a moment when you were just like "Okay, I'm done with this, I can't do this anymore"? Was it learning about the turtles or did the turtles come after? Describes the moment when you do make your life change.

[SG]: The turtles came after. I remember I was about six months in when I realized that this is not gonna drive me. It's interesting. People always say listen to yourself and follow your heart on these things. I think that when you're young - like twenty two years old - there's a lot of noise and a lot of anxiety, a lot of pressure. Student loan debt, all these things that come together and they make it really hard and it's easy to say, you know, follow your heart, be poor if that's what you think is gonna happen to you. You might say I'm not gonna take that risk. What I realized really quickly was I'm not going to be successful. I wasn't willing to invest the time and the energy to get really good at it. I had no pathway when I started job shadowing, a job above mine that I wanted to have and I thought I'm I'm gonna flounder here or I could try to invent myself along the lines that I want to. Part of my inspirations was friends taking a different course. One of my friends became a wildlife biologist working in Las Vegas. I guess he was studying burrowing owls and and desert tortoises and his job involved him, you know, running around the desert as project manager looking at NIPA contracts and you know all kinds of really cool stuff and I thought you know he's doing some really cool work and here I am doing something I don't want to do. I have to shift gears. I looked around for a job that would pay me but because I don't have that background - I hadn't studied it in college, which is what I should have done - eventually I just had to save my money and take an unpaid internship to kind of restart my career. That's how I ended up looking around and the reason I ended up being in Greece was because I talked to someone at Duke University about a project they were working on I was kind of interested in sea turtles. I'd seen them in Greece in the past and she said your Greek and I know a wonderful person who's working on this stuff in Greece and she would be able to take you on as an unpaid intern if you're willing. And that's how I ended up going to Greece to take this United Nations programme on sea turtles going on.

[VRS]: Amazing! Did you experience any push back from other friends or your family for taking this drastic shift in career?

[SG]: I think people looked at me like I didn't know what I wanted to do. No one really said, you know, why would you give up this great opportunity because it wasn't a job that that I clearly wanted to keep, you know? And so I would have had to to make some kind of a life change. I think they were probably thinking, you know, I'm having a hard time getting started and so here I am about to take six months and spend whatever little money I saved and restart my career. But honestly I didn't get anybody - I guess in my circle - that was upset about it, because in my circle, all of my friends were in environmental careers already. They had gone to college for environmental careers then came right out into them. So I think in some ways they weren't as worried as I was in college about going that route. They knew what they wanted to do and they were able to be more successful quicker. I think that I tell young people now don't be afraid to follow things that you know - if you're if you're spending all your time outside the classroom interested in something you should probably be figuring out ways to study that in the classroom also. It's gonna pay off. 

[VRS]:Thank you. that's a really wonderful message. I'm wondering if we could switch a little bit to talking specifically about sustainability now. So you describe how complex of a concept this is and how your skills linguistically, your skills both in your background as a person in finance and as a person who didn't formally study environmental sciences until a little bit later after you got going in the field, all came together to help you now in your work as an advocate for sustainability. But what is sustainability in the simplest definition?

[SG]: In the simplest definition this definition I go back to is the Brundtland definition of the Commission that was put together that first discussed in 1986 what sustainability was. It was a United Nations commission. In the preamble to what they wrote, which is called "Our Common Future" - it's a great document to look up, it's bigger than just the definition - they said that sustainability is the ability of current generations to meet our needs without impinging upon or inhibiting the ability of future generations also to meet their needs. Sustainability is an intra-generational and intergenerational concept that says live well today without you living well, you know, causing your daughter, or grandchild, or great grand child to have a worse life. It's understanding that these are generational issues and you can't do things that take away from future generations' ability to live as well as you do. 

[VRS]: So that's a really hopeful, beautiful definition and now I'm going to ask you to destroy it. 

[SG & VRS]: *laughter*

[VRS]: What is the end of sustainability? What's the absolute worst case scenario for your field?

[SG]: So for my field, you know, this is a question of climate change, in some ways has become the elephant in the room, or the eight hundred pound gorilla, if you will...

[VRS]: Mhmm

[SG]:...because you can't have any discussion anymore. It used to be that, I mean, when I was younger I was talking about the need to protect the rainforests and biodiversity and clean water and all the things we think about as just pure environmentalism, right? Like, let's protect the national endowments that we have. Now with climate change, we understand the threat of climate change more clearly. It's obvious that yes, you can go into the cloud forest in Costa Rica and try to save the frogs that are there from clear cutting forests. But if climate change, you know, keep apace, the cloud forest as we know it in Costa Rica will vanish. The entire cloud forest will vanish over the next fifty years. Right, and so you have to address climate change to address anything and make anything sustainable. So the end of sustainability in that respect looks like a scenario of runaway climate change, where the worst catastrophic effects of climate change kick in. We know that that's largely gonna start beyond one and a half degrees Celsius and so we're approaching that number, and that's, you know, a scary thought. There does come a point where if we put enough carbon in the atmosphere, the radial forcing that goes along with it and the additional heat that comes in and everything, and all the feedback loops that are going to kick in are gonna mean that humans are gonna be taken out of the equation. 

So an example of that is looking at the the frozen tundra, or the methane frozen methane in Siberia, for instance. There comes a point where we will get warm enough that the frozen areas of Siberia will start to thaw. When they do, they're gonna release a lot of methane. Methane is a gas - CH4 - right, it's carbon and hydrogen. Four carbons and a hydrogen - oh, sorry, a carbon and four hydrogens - so that that gas in the atmosphere as nearly twenty nine to thirty times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide and once the methane starts thawing and that CH4 starts getting released, it will cause a dramatic amount of warming in atmosphere the we can't stop that will cause more warming it will cause more melting glaciers, will cause other feedback loops to kick in and once this process starts we can't do anything about it. And that will cause - really, climate change will cause ecological collapse across the planet. So sustainability really has become about stopping climate change but then within that you have these issues of of the immediate impacts of climate change and unsustainable living are not evenly distributed, right? So you have people in the very wealthy areas of the United States at least - we'll feel the effects of climate change in a different way than people in the developing world who don't have this financial or technological buffer. So sustainability says, yes, climate change is a problem it's probably the biggest problem we face but the impacts of how climate change affects all of us is going to be uneven and we really need to worry about how all will suffer. Some of us will suffer earlier and more than others, and that matters also.

[VRS]: How does sustainability intersect with our current situation of a pandemic?

[SG]: Really tough question. I guess my first thought on the pandemic is what that it is a really terrible time for all of us 

[VRS]: Yeah.

[SG]: Especially of us that are more vulnerable and it's honestly hard to know who is more vulnerable, right? Just because you're twenty years old or thirty years old doesn't necessarily mean you are out of the woods. I think we're seeing something like forty four percent of patients in New York City right now are between the ages of twenty and forty five - those are the people in the hospital, not people who have contracted it. So I think that what it means is - and that's where I want to start with - is that it means it's a social problem. It's something we're all connected to and it can affect us in profound ways. 

First and foremost, we need to figure out how to stop this and how to think about an anti viral or palliative regime or a vaccine or something that's gonna stop it. In the meantime social distancing is a big part of this. All of these sort of concept I think we can think about for the lens of sustainability. It's a helpful tool in my work to think about this pandemic through that lens. What that means is as we scale across all society you see an impact,right. This pandemic is gonna have an impact on a certain percentage of people. People might perish in this. Our economies are disrupted. There are a lot of issues that we can name that are that are going along with this. But those impacts are unevenly distributed, right. Again, think about this as if I'm twenty perhaps as a twenty year old age category my risk is less. But your responsibility to others, right, to the older generation is really important. And this is a similar thing with sustainability - you may not suffer the effects of climate change war or water quality or poor air quality directly you don't want to say well that's not my problem because you're thinking about someone else downstream of you or someone else in a different part of the world who doesn't have the same you know I guess offer from this so the pandemic is the number to think about regardless of age, regardless of how you're gonna come out on this, you have to be concerned. You know, we think about economy on this also. Economically, some of us are going to be impacted harder than others. You work as a bartender - and I did when I was in college so I know kind of what that would feel like for someone to say "Hey, the restaurant's closing, you got to go home," right? I didn't have health insurance. I didn't have a a paycheck. I couldn't work from home. So I would've been more severely impacted as a bartender than I would now in my current role. 

I think that we have to be really careful to think about how in this time of need do we think about society as a whole and think about the fact that resources and effort has to be put on to help the people who work in the most impacted. Now, that said you have groups at Stanford and others were talking about the rise of pandemics. So, you know, they call it zoonotic pandemics which come from our interaction with other species like bats, or pangolins, or whatever. You have these different viruses are are probably the product of us pushing further and further into biological spaces we haven't been in the past. And this is a longer conversation, I really want to parcel the two or separate the two. I don't want to point a finger and say humans are encroaching environment that's causing this pandemic because that's insensitive to the fact that we have to deal with this right now. But I think long term, the balance of how we live, our footprint on the planet, it is gonna be really important. Every time we kind of move into spaces where we haven't been and we disrupt natural balances that existed we expose ourselves to these kind of risks and we are going to have to think really seriously about how we, you know, predict these things coming, how we live in a more balanced way with these wild areas and wild species that we're encroaching upon. And how if we don't, these effects will continue to be felt. And that's kind of how I think sustainability comes into this.

[VRS]: What gives you hope right now?

[SG]: For what?

[VRS]: *Laughs* For human life, for the future of our planet and our species!

[SG]: I think we really have to get serious about thinking about, you know, I said that that climate change, in terms of sustainability, right? Sustainability is balancing our social endeavors and social well-being with our economic vibrancy, so the economy, and then with the environment. So it's this balancing act and we're not doing a great job of that right now and the answers are really complex in that the trade offs are really complex, right? You can't tell people to stop their livelihoods and we want to make sure that we protect the environment. We want to make sure that we are not disproportionately impacting the most powerless, weakest, most economically insecure parts of society and so I think that my hope for sustainability is that we really get serious in thinking about what that balance is.

[VRS] Hmm.

[SG] If we don't we're gonna find out that there are limits to what we can do as a society right there are capacity limits, maybe not at the local level. I think about this all the time. You know,Las Vegas doesn't have any water but there are millions of people living in the desert. So carrying capacity in a biological sense, right, means nothing for human beings. 

[VRS] Mhmm.

[SG]: We can do whatever we want to, we can move resources around at the local scale. But when we scale up to put a two spaceship earth, it's a lot harder to think about it about overshooting our limits. If we overshare limits as a planet, there are consequences. If we figure out what those limits are in what we want to do with them, my hope for sustainability is that we will figure out a way to stop climate change but in the process also thinking about it's not just climate change right it's it's about our biodiversity loss, a whole bunch of different things that are underneath climate change. Right now,we have to think about, you know, we have other issues and pressures. Like by the year - I think it's by the year twenty fifty - we have to have fifty percent more food on this planet to feed the growing population. That means putting an area the size of the Amazon basin or the Congo rainforest into food production. If we're talking about biodiversity and producing more food we have to have a technological change in how we deliver food from an agricultural perspective. We're talking about, you know, fifty percent of people being water insecure by the year twenty fifty, also. How we deliver water, how we use water has to change. So in a very real way my hope is that we'll get serious about thinking about how do we live well. We don't turn the lights out and go back into caves - people often say sustainability is about taking things away. That's not true. What it does mean is we have to be smarter and more efficient in how we deal with resources and think about what our priorities are socially and then let our actions follow from that.

[VRS]: Do you think this pandemic is helping us re prioritize our social needs?

[SG]: I think it's really too early to tell in the middle of a crisis. A lot of what we are doing is reacting to, responding to, what we think are the immediate needs. I think our number one goal is to keep people alive, you know. And that's people who are five years old and people who are eighty five years old. I think our resources should be put towards making sure that we minimize the number of deaths associated with this. I think for me that - that's as an American - at least that's what my number one priority is. To say how do we get out of this in a way that we preserve human life and then we can take time to reflect. You know, I think that what this crisis has done is it showed us really clearly how globalized our world is. We always talk about globalization, talk about supply chains from China or Indonesia or Brazil being intertwined. I think this is shown us, it has laid bare the insecurities of all supply chains and the problems of being a globalized interconnected community. And the lessons we can take from that are either to become less connected or to think about being more connected and sharing information better and working together. And my hope is that the latter would be the result and it wouldn't be just kind of a protectionism that emerges from so often have a crisis. You have a sort of objective reality but the subjective interpretation is unpredictable, right? It doesn't mean that just because we had a crisis we're gonna work better together. It can cause us to actually retrench more and go back into a protective stance, which would be bad for everybody, I think.

[VRS]: Yeah

[SG]: What we do know it is a crisis and we do know that it has exposed the frailties in our economy and how an interconnected globalized society works. And we have to figure out how do we move forward in a way that we don't lose prosperity. And that we continue to enhance the resiliency of the system we live in. I think a big piece of that is the environmental, right? It's how do we continue to have, you know, an environment that is livable.

[VRS]: Absolutely. Anything else I should have asked you?

[SG]: No, don't mean to ramble, that's all.

[VRS]: You've been great. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your expertise with us! 

[VRS]: This has been Art at the End of the World with Vero Rose Smith. Tune in next week to learn about another way in the world may end. The music for this podcast was written, performed, and produced by Gabi Vanek. You can hear more of her work at her Soundcloud which is linked in the show notes. Thanks, Gabi! And thanks for listening.

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