The Most Important Question

You're wasting your talent on bullshit while the world burns.

You — yes, you — can actually use your very unique set of skills for good. Even and especially at scale, even — yes — right now.

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What Can I Do?

We (Quinn) has been avoiding this question for quite a while.

I even wrote a few thousand words about it a couple months ago and didn't publish it because it was a bit of a downer.

But that's kind of malpractice in a way because we promised we don't shy away from the hard stuff even if the goal is to help you understand what you can do about it.

Just like there's never really an optimal time in your life to get married, or have a baby, or get arrested, there's never a good time to talk about bird flu, which means it's always the right time to talk about bird flu, and especially when you've got the best of the best on the line.

What can I do about bird flu?

That's today's big question and my returning guest is the wonderful Dr. Nahid Bhadelia.

Dr. Bhadelia is the founding director of the BU Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. She's a board certified infectious diseases physician and an associate professor at the BU School of Medicine.

She served as the Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID 19 Response for the White House COVID 19 Response Team in 2022 and 2023, where she coordinated the interagency programs for global COVID 19 vaccine donations from the United States.

Nahid was also the policy lead for Project NextGen, a 5 billion dollar health and human services program aimed at developing next generation vaccines and treatments for pandemic prone coronaviruses. 

She also served as the interim testing coordinator for the White House mpox response team and is the Director and Co-founder of Biothreats Emergence Analysis and Communications Network, or BEACON, an open source outbreak surveillance program. 

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What Can I Do?

Be prepared — because these fires that are still burning are only the beginning. Start somewhere, start right in front of you, do what you can.

LA isn’t the only place suffering this week, but it was home for a long time, so here’s vetted ways you can contribute right now, from near or afar.

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What Can I Do?

It’s been a minute. Thanks for your patience. Please check out my 2025 preview, and if you’d be so kind, share it widely.

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What Can I Do?

What's the missing link in local journalism?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Lyndsey Gilpin.

Lyndsey is the Senior Manager of Community Engagement at Grist. Lyndsey was the founder and executive editor at Southerly, a nonprofit media organization that equipped people who face environmental injustices and are at most at risk of climate change effects with journalism and resources on natural disasters, pollution, food, energy, and more.

It was very groundbreaking, and now she's brought that to Grist. Lyndsey was recently a John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow at Stanford University, focusing on information access in rural southern communities of color, where she is from, based in Louisville.

And in an age of mass dis and misinformation it's more important than ever that we not only fund journalism and obviously read it, but local journalism and journalists and publishers, editors, photographers, documenters, and more that are of the communities they are based in, who have and continue to build trust in an ongoing, two way conversation to help people get information, to connect the last mile and make sure it goes back and forth.

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Become An Important Member

This entire (short!) episode is a call to action. It's time to do this thing...do the thing, but also take care of yourselves and your loved ones these next couple weeks.

It's a lot right now.

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Is multisolving the future? Is it today? Should we do more?

That's all today's big question and my guest is Dr. Elizabeth Sawin.

Dr. Sawin is the Founder and Director of the Multisolving Institute, which is convenient for our conversation. She's an expert on solutions that address climate change while also improving health, well being, and economic vitality. She developed multisolving to describe such win win win solutions.

Beth writes and speaks about multisolving, climate change, and leadership in complex systems for both national and international audiences.

Since 2014, Beth has participated in the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, a continuing dialogue on issues of climate change and sustainability among a select group of humanities scholars, writers, artists, and climate scientists.

Beth is a biologist with a Ph.D. From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M. I. T. She co-founded Climate Interactive in 2010 and served as Climate Interactive's co-director from 2010 until 2022.

Beth’s work has influenced me quite a bit, as you can see in the app.

We've got co benefits all over the place, more on that soon and today. She's been on the list for a while here, and yet it took a couple recent hurricanes to actually get her on the show to talk about her journey, her mentors, her new book, and how we can most effectively deal with all of this.

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How do we make it easier for more Americans to reliably put food (in particular, hot food) on the table?

That's today’s big question, and my guest is Salaam Bhatti.

Salaam is the SNAP Director at the Food Research and Action Center, a 501c3 that uses advocacy and strategic partnerships to improve the health and well being of people struggling against poverty related hunger in the United States.

Before joining the Food Research and Action Center, Salam was the Public Benefits Attorney and Deputy Director of the Virginia Poverty Law Center where he specialized in public benefits law.

Salaam also served as the director of Virginia Hunger Solutions, where he supported the initiative's mission of eradicating hunger and enhancing the nutrition, health, and overall well being of children and families living in poverty throughout this great commonwealth.

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We first ran this episode in May 2023, but following back-to-back hurricanes in Florida this month, it remains as relevant as ever.

You've got insurance, right? Are you sure?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Washington Post reporter Brianna Sacks.

Brianna's an extreme weather and disaster reporter for the Post, where she explores how climate change is transforming the United States through violent storms, intense heat, widespread wildfires, and other forms of extreme weather.

Brianna deploys to disaster zones, which are sometimes very close to home, and does enterprise reporting on the preparations for responses to and the aftermaths of catastrophic events.

We're having this conversation today because last month Brianna revealed how insurers have slashed Hurricane Ian payouts far below damage estimates, often up to 80%.

I cannot emphasize enough that the future includes an insurance landscape that is among the most important in our very brittle economy and society.

It underpins everything we rely on, so understanding not only your own insurance but how well your mortgage holder and the system at large are prepared for what's here and what's coming, is essential.

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There’s no word for “conservation” in many Indigenous languages.

Some come close, but mean something more like “taking care of” or “looking after.”

And that’s probably because the very idea of conservation, to “prevention the wasteful use of a resource”, would have been, and continue to be, foreign to many of North America’s Indigenous peoples, who lived in an entirely different, co-dependent relationship with nature.

That is to say, to have had a relationship at all.

A relationship with the very same nature of which we’re inextricably part of, of which we rely on for clean air, food, and water – or it’s game over.

And now, if we’re not facing game over, we’re certainly up against the final boss.

We live on stolen lands that were tended for thousands of years by Indigenous and Native peoples have been dried out by mostly white settlers in what seems like the blink of an eye.

Land now covered in cities, in suburbs, in industrialized agriculture, desperately and even controversially conserved as national and state parks.

Waters onshore and offshore, full of plastic and fertilizer, once bountiful, now overfished.

The receipts are in and it’s not gone well for colonialists’ stewardship over the single habitable ecosystem as far as anyone can tell.

New voices are needed, new policies and practices are needed, and perhaps the most compelling ones come from our land’s longest-tenured human inhabitants.

And while, yes, I’m focused on actions we can take to build a vastly cleaner and better future for all people, you know I work hard to bring you the necessary context, to understand how we got here, why we got here, to understand the decisions and systems involved – all of which should only make us more effective at taking action.

My guest today is Dr. Jessica Hernandez.

Dr. Hernandez is an environmental scientist, founder of environmental non-profit Piña Soul, and the author of the new book, “Fresh Banana Leaves”, where she weaves together her family’s relationship with nature, as part of nature, her family’s history of being displaced over and over, through the lens of eco-colonialism, and how Indigenous-led restoration is the way forward.

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