Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative The Creative Process

“The American Climate Corps builds on the legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which came out of the New Deal after the Great Depression in the United States when the country was getting very close to there being a toppling of the government because there was such a crisis here after the Depression. There were Dust Bowls. People were migrating all over the country to try to find work. And it was a really dark time in the United States. So part of the New Deal included establishing this Conservation Corps, where–and it was only men at the time–young men could go to work, earn a liveable wage, work on teams, and help to build things in the United States. And some of them planted trees. So some of it was conservation, some of them planted trees. They helped with the railroads. They built all sorts of things with the Army Corps of Engineers. So there has been a call for a while now to build an American Climate Corps, which is building off of this legacy. 
The Biden administration finally announced the American Climate Corps last September during Climate Week. In fact, the announcement came out, and one of the unfortunate things about the Climate Corps is that it builds on this amazing legacy, but it didn't receive much funding because the funding was originally going to be part of the Build Back Better Act, which the Biden administration proposed early on. The climate-related policy that ended up being reformulated and repackaged as the Inflation Reduction Act. the Climate Corps was not funded as part of that. So it's coming out in a much more limited manner, but what it basically is doing is merging a number of preexisting programs that are designed to help train young people to do work around climate change broadly defined across different agencies in the U. S. government to train them so that they have experience working on addressing climate change in a variety of ways, and also have a pathway into doing green jobs. Be they in the federal government, for nonprofits, or elsewhere in the government. And so it's a wonderful opportunity. The hope is that it will expand out to be thousands, if not more than thousands, tens of thousands of jobs.”

How can we make the radical social changes needed to address the climate crisis? What kind of large ecological disaster or mass mobilization in the streets needs to take place before we take meaningful climate action?

Dana R. Fisher is the Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity and Professor in the School of International Service at American University. Fisher’s research focuses on questions related to democracy, civic engagement, activism, and climate politics. Current projects include studying political elites’ responses to climate change, and the ways federal service corps programs in the US are integrating climate into their work. She is a self-described climate-apocalyptic optimist and co-developed the framework of AnthroShift to explain how social actors are reconfigured in the aftermath of widespread perceptions and experiences of risk. Her seventh book is Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.

“There’s a lot of greenwashing that's going on these days. It is great marketing. And that was really the reason why I wrote this book. I had started to see the patterns. You can start to tell them the companies that are genuinely doing it versus the companies that are just talking about it. So that was one indicator, you know, a company that would send out a press release about their goals and what they anticipated to do in the next 5 to 10 years was very different from companies who had said, you know what, this is what we've achieved. Regenerative started coming into the lexicon, the term in 2017, 2018. And regenerative means to regenerate, means to bring life into something. To sustain means to keep the status quo. And regenerative looks at things from a very holistic lens. You know, it's like if you're going to run a regenerative farm, it's all the different components of the farm and the ecosystem ideally come within the ecosystem.”

What is regenerative business? How can we create a business mindset that addresses social, economic and environmental issues?
Esha Chhabra has written for national and international publications over the last 15 years, focusing on global development, the environment, and the intersection of business and impact. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and other publications. She is the author of Working to Restore: Harnessing the Power of Business to Heal the Earth.

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”

What is road ecology? How are our roads driving certain species towards extinction? And what can we do about it?

Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.