Sustain What?

Andy @Revkin
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Sustain What?

Sustain What? is a series of conversations, seeking solutions where complexity and consequence collide on the sustainability frontier. This program contains audio highlights from hundreds of video webcasts hosted by Andy Revkin, founder of the Columbia Climate School’s Initiative for Communication and Sustainability. Dale Willman is the associate director of the initiative. Revkin and Willman believe sustainability has no meaning on its own. The first step toward success is to ask: Sustain what? How? And for whom? revkin.substack.com

  1. DEC 6

    Clarifying Methane Sources and Solutions

    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) Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 3m

  2. NOV 23

    What I've Learned and Unlearned in 40 Years of Climate Reporting

    This new 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.” Sustain What is a reader-supported project. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

    47 min

  3. NOV 3

    How do You Stay Sane in Such Turbulent Times? For Me, One Path is Still Music

    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: To help sustain Sustain What, including my musical interludes, consider chipping in as a paid subscriber. 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. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

    2 min

  4. OCT 28

    Live from Trump's Hate-Filled Madison Square Garden Rally

    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.” Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

    20 min

  5. OCT 24

    What to Think - and do - About "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters"

    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. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 18m

  6. OCT 22

    Dissecting the "Scale Monster" Stalking the Energy Transition

    Here’s the podcast version of my “Watchwords” conversation with Mekala Krishnan, the lead author of a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, “The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition.” I use the term watchwords to highlight terms or phrases that too often confuse more than clarify. We were joined halfway through by Jessica Lovering, the co-founder and exective director of Good Energy Collective, which has a its mission “building the progressive case for nuclear energy as an essential part of the broader climate change agenda and working to align the clean energy space with environmental justice and sustainability goals.” My curtain-raiser post has other ways to watch and share it: Julio Friedmann, a friend and past colleague (at Columbia), has also written a fine post on this study and his own analysis. As he writes, there’s “a reluctance by many to confront the realities of The Hard Stuff: the parts of The Work that are costly, challenging, poorly framed, and utterly necessary.” Here’s the Scale Monster image I deploy on social media off and on. Free free to share it! As you likely know, this dispatch and webcast are mostly a labor of love now - but it is labor. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

    59 min

  7. OCT 4

    How Appalachian Geography Amped Up Helene's Flood Impact - and How this Relates to California's watery future

    First, here’s my freshly updated post offering a heap of ways anyone anywhere can help the organizations and volunteers working nonstop around Hurricane Helene devastation zones: Second, here’s a shoutout to the professional and volunteer first responders doing highly dangerous work seeking and rescuing survivors. Several are among the more than 215 victims so far. The North Carolina National Guard has been working nonstop. Finally, please watch or listen to my Sustain What conversation seeking lessons from the catastrophic inland flooding triggered when Hurricane Helene's remnants collided with the Appalachian Mountains. My guest is David McConville, a data visualizer and risk communicator (his company is Spherical Studio) who grew up in the regions hammered by Helene and lived and worked in Asheville for many years trying to use technology, including a visualization dome, to convey the flood threat in the steep hills and deep hollows there. I got to know McConville after meeting him in Asheville when I spoke at wonderful Warren Wilson College there. We bumped into each other off and on in our separte, but related, journeys trying to figure out how to use media to foster sustainable human journeys. As the catastrophic scope of the historic flooding in the region emerged last weekend, McConville said this on Facebook: My heart is breaking today for many close friends in Asheville and western North Carolina, where I lived for over 20 years. I’m also feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu. The catastrophic flooding of Hurricane Frances in 2004 got me interested in visualizing the dynamics of watersheds, impervious surfaces, and property development within bioregions. I created the visualization below 15 years ago with The Elumenati and collaborators to help policymakers better grasp these dynamics and their consequences. Eerily, it features simulations of flooding in Biltmore Village, the real-world versions of which are currently all over the news. He continued: “Spherical is continuing this work in Los Angeles with Andy Lipkis, whose work on urban resilience was similarly catalyzed by his experience with flash floods in LA. As Daniel Swain notes, the looming threat of California's next ARKStorm bears striking parallels to what southern Appalachia is currently facing: If you’ve been following me for awhile you already know about the history and future of extreme atmospheric rivers, with a repeat of the 1861-2 event that created an inland sea inevitable, if its timing remains uncertain. But here’s an excerpt from, and link to, climate and weather scientist Swain’s great thread and here’s a post of his from 2022 on this threat, amplified by human-caused global warming. Sustain What is a passion project but it’s more likely to persist if you become a paying supporter. The wider picture of disaster amnesia In the webcast McConville and I talk about the challenges in trying to get communities like Asheville to act on data showing profound, but rare, hazards. It’s not easy. In our chat he notes such warnings can end up just as ignored as Japan’s ancient, moss-encrusted “tsunami stones” were as generations forgot the warnings of ancestors who carved phrases like this into large tablets set on hillsides above the reach of great rare waves: High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants…. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point. This is something I wrote about back in 2011: I did a highly relevant Sustain What conversation some months back with Daniel Starosta, who studies the art, music, and history produced in the wake of disasters to better understand the social dynamics that can either impede or boost preparedness facing future threats. Starosta’s research has spanned the landscape of disaster from hurricanes in Florida to tsunamis in Japan. He also works in climate adaptation and disaster resilience planning, with experience from Puerto Rico to Hawai'i to Bhutan. Here’s that conversation: Exploring Disasters, Culture, Forgetfulness and Preparedness This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

    29 min

  8. SEP 15

    As Team Trump Stokes Dangerous Hate for Haitians, It's a Good Time to Spread Propaganda Literacy

    If you like what I’m trying to do with Sustain What, hit the ♡ button. Even as Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine has defended the vast majority of the state’s Haitian population, while recognizing serious issues related to the surge of newcomers, Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has double downed on his calls to “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing” - stoking sufficient fear and hatred in pursuit of the White House that bomb threats continue and racist Proud Boys have reportedly showed up in Springfield. And Haitian residents are living in fear. With all of this in mind, I thought it worth highlighting a Sustain What conversation I had in December 2020, as then-President Trump pushed his “stop the steal” election lies and laid the foundation for the January 6 insurrection. My guest was University of Rhode Island communications professor Renee Hobbs, who teaches propaganda literacy, is the author of a fantastic guide book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age, and has built a priceless suite of online learning tools to explore and share. Here’s a book excerpt! She provides a fantastic overview of the range of propaganda strategies, tactics and tools, noting the word should be seen as neutral. There is “good” propaganda. But, boy, there is dangerous propaganda, as well. Emergency mode A key section of our conversation dealt with the kind of dangerous political propaganda that is in overdrive right now. I told Hobbs about a conversation I had earlier in 2020 with New York University journalism professort Jay Rosen, when he was warning newsrooms that democracy was in danger in the face of Trump’s nonstop lies and this required new approaches to reporting and presenting the news. Here’s that snippet from Jay, in which he said, “I think we’re facing the biggest propaganda moment in modern U.S. history.” Keeping in mind what transpired amid the pandemic, and even more so the following January, he was surely right. And here we are again. In December 2020, Hobbs wholeheartedly concurred with his perspective: I have a sure sense of urgency. The fire hose of falsehood…actually goes way, way back. That's not a new technique either…. Actually throughout the 20th century, we have faced crises where propagandists had ascendency, where their ideas gained traction, and where only with a relentless pursuit of truth, only with the public activation of moral indignation, only over time can can truly dangerous propaganda be be countered. So we're in that place right now. And we're very vulnerable. And, yes, here we are yet again. So please listen up and share this converastion. There’s a (very) rough searchable transcript here. Transcripts can be smoothed out if more of my subscribers chip in financially. I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber to help sustain my work and keep this content open for those who can’t afford to pay. And please explore Hobbs’s fantastic array of open learning resources! There’s a whole section on “meme politics.” There’s a crowd-sourced “rate this propaganda” gallery. Here’s my full April 2020 conversation with Jay Rosen: The Press, the Pandemic and Presidential Propaganda This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

    59 min
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About

Sustain What? is a series of conversations, seeking solutions where complexity and consequence collide on the sustainability frontier. This program contains audio highlights from hundreds of video webcasts hosted by Andy Revkin, founder of the Columbia Climate School’s Initiative for Communication and Sustainability. Dale Willman is the associate director of the initiative. Revkin and Willman believe sustainability has no meaning on its own. The first step toward success is to ask: Sustain what? How? And for whom? revkin.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Andy @Revkin
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2024
  • Episodes
    42
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Andy @Revkin
  • Show Website
    Sustain What?

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