Sustain What‪?‬ Andy @Revkin

I just had a solutions-focused waste-cutting Sustain What chat with two marvelous guides - Edward Humes, the Pulitzer-winning author of Total Garbage - How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World (following up on his 2012 book Garbology - Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash); and Sarah K. Nichols, who’s driven some of the most significant innovations in state policy around waste reduction and now works for an innovative beverage container recycling company called Clynk. There’s more about Clynk below.
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Nichols, who’s featured in Humes’ book, was a prime force shaping the successful 2021 effort to expand Maine’s “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR) laws to cover packaging - making it the first state in the nation to do so, shifting the financial burden for recycling to corporations from local communities.
As the trade publication Packaging World has reported, the final regulations are emerging this year and are sorely needed, given the straining recycling budgets of many Maine municipalities (including our budget-strapped town):
Many Maine communities have suspended or cut back their recycling programs because of limited options and rising costs for managing these materials, sending them to landfills instead. With landfills throughout the state nearing capacity, this temporary solution creates another expensive problem: expanding existing landfills.
In our conversation, Nichols explained that corporations aren’t always the enemy, pointing to the leadership of one of Maine’s largest craft beer producers, Allagash Brewing Company. Read Allagash’s page extolling the virtues of EPR.
Every town needs a change-making “Marge”
I love how this section of Humes’ book on Nichols echoes what Jigar Shah, who leads the Biden administration’s loan program for clean energy, has called for - an army of local doers and changemakers willing to put in time to be sure their communities can access billions in federal assets:
Nichols worked on this for eight years, explaining that her idea wasn't a tax on businesses, as they would surely claim, but a long-overdue bill for picking up after their mess. She made her pitch, with plenty of data to back it up, at town council after town council, business by business, and during an endless number of rubber-chicken lunches and dinners with volunteer groups and civic organizations. Nichols's environmental organization is respected but small, so she recruited a statewide army of community volunteers to build support and spread the word about her recycling makeover at the local level. She calls this force her "Marges"- named for her first volunteer in an earlier environmental campaign. She defines a Marge as someone who's already an environmental advocate, but who needs some help on how to take action effectively. The Marges have become a force to be reckoned with in Maine, Nichols's not-so-secret weapon.
Similar laws are in the works in many other states and Nichols’ former employer, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, has a 10-tips sheet available for anyone elsewhere hoping to smooth the path to a more rational and effective system for reducing and recycling package.
Humes book is filled with remarkable examples of communities - with no red or blue divide - and companies finding ways to cut waste of all kinds - from trash to energy to greenhouse gas emissions. Here are a few examples from his website, edwardhumes.com:
Here’s a video primer on Clynk’s innovative approach to beverage container redemption:
Related Sustain What posts and episodes:



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I’ve spent a lot of time assessing ways to defeat what I call the “complexity monster” impeding climate and energy solutions. Here’s a Sustain What webcast on a fresh approach, including building a big welcome table instead of walls. Also watch and share on Facebook, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn. (Here’s a rough Trint transcript.)
I was intrigued to learn about an upcoming set of live seminars offering ways to stay cool, connected and effective amid the nonstop turbulence around and within our fossil-fuel-heated climate system. The workshop, called “Embracing our Emergency,” is being led later this spring by the progressive Emmy-winning filmmaker Josh Fox, best known for his HBO documentary “Gasland,” and the wide-ranging author and convener .
As Fox and Pinchbeck explain in our chat, they’re convening an array of guests, from to Jane Fonda and Xiye Bastida, to help build a community that can better understand and navigate today’s polycrisis. There are 10 live sessions between April 28 and May 29. You can learn more and register here. There’s a fee but they say there are discounts if needed.
A key focus, Fox says, is to encourage progressives to focus urgently on building resilience now for populations most at risk (a core theme of my writing here of course) even as they work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Another, he says, is reinforcing the reality this is a marathon, not a sprint (echoing a core theme of my Dot Earth blog):
Activism in general is like being an attention deficit disorder marathon runner. You know, you constantly think the race is going to be over the next 20 seconds. And yet it's going to go on for your whole life. So you have to constantly be re re-energizing and re-engaging.
Pinchbeck posted about the project on his Substack newsletter and there’s an excerpt below, along with a link to a free guide to “Seven Essential Tools For Surviving - and Thriving - in a Time of Climate Crisis.”👇
Some of the resulting funds from the seminars will go to helping Fox finish his latest film, “The Welcome Table,” which explores the surging flows of human dislocation and migration being propelled by hot spots of political and climatic turmoil and profound imbalances in economic opportunity.
He began reporting and filming for this project six years ago and has built a vivid worldwide picture of the lives of dislocated populations around the world and within the United States. As he explains in our conversation, the film centers on a keystone idea - that building a bigger “welcome table” is far more likely to foster thriving in the United States and elsewhere than building walls.
I reached Fox in New Orleans, where he’s preparing for the film’s grand finale - chronicling the construction of a 1,000-foot-long table on a levee threatened by rising seas and a celebratory gathering around that welcome table featuring many of the people featured in the film. You can attend on April 10.
We talked about the cyclic nature of immigration surges and reactionary surges of nationalism and hatred. He mentioned a century-old cartoon that he found for the film, “The Unrestrictied Dumping-Ground,” which depicts Uncle Sam overwhelmed by waves of ratlike Italian immigrants. Here’s that excerpt from our discussion.
Fox said:
Can you imagine New York City without pizza? Can you imagine America without pizza, without bagels?
What is the pizza in 100 years going to be? We do know these people are going to be a benefit to us. It’s our benefit to celebrate culture rather than ostracize and criminalize. And if we haven’t learned this lesson by now we don’t know what America is.
I couldn’t agree more.
From the great clips I’ve seen, the film is coming together in Fox’s inimitable and creative style, meshing music, events and other arts with gripping footage and his wry wit. I’ll do more on the film later this year. Here’s the trailer:
One of the remarkable people in the film

📺 🎧 This is the podcast episode for the post below on a consequential scoop by a Brazilian environmental journalist revealing how the confessed murderer of an environmental hero in the western corner of the Amazon River basin 35 years ago quietly rose to regional influence under a religious nickname 1,500 miles to the east. My guests are:
* Cristiane Prizibisczki, the O Eco journalist who broke the story
* Angélica Mendes, Chico Mendes’s granddaughter, who has a biology Ph.D. and is president of Comitê Chico Mendes
Why should anyone outside of the region pay attention to the reemergence of Darci Alves Pereira as “Pastor Daniel” in Medicilândia, a remote Amazonian town of only 30,000 people? This incident is a tiny window on a big and worrisome reality in Brazil.
There’s been enormous progress stanching fires and forest clearing since the election of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, but the rural right-wing and evangelical movements supporting former Presiden Jair Bolsonaro still have substantial power and Lula’s victory was by a very thin margin. And Bolsonaro and allies face an ongoing investigation of allegations of a coup attempt.
So please listen, subscribe if you don’t already and share this post with others.
Read the companion post for lots more:
Here’s some of my election coverage and here’s my post on the slain Amazon defender, Chico Mendes, and my 1990 radio interview about my book on Chico with the famed broadcaster and writer Studs Terkel.)
Here’s Medicilândia.

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I hope you'll watch, share and weigh in on this invaluable Sustain What conversation I just had with , the lead researcher at Our World in Data and author of the Not the End of the World, an invaluable book offering a data-based foundation for discussion and action on the full span of sustainability challenges and choices, from stemming warming to spurring human advancement where the need is deepest.
She’s getting an enormous amount of justified attention, including a TED Talk and a podcast session with Bill Gates (who also is a big financial supporter of Our World in Data). She’s also caught between edge-pushing data distorters or disbelievers proclaiming either doom or scam. It’s not a fun position to occupy.
I hope you’ll subscribe to, or share, Ritchie’s fine Substack dispatch! Here’s a particularly fine post:
In the second half of the chat, I asked Ritchie how she and the folks at Our World in Data deal with “qualitative data” - the meat and potatoes of social science (think of studies done by interviewing hundreds of people in a field or in a plight).
They don’t, really. I proposed that this body of science is easily as important to anyone trying to chart sustainable human pathways as the quantitative data and also proposed we plan a future webcast with scientists across disciplinary divides.
I mentioned a Sustain What webcast I did with two social scientists, Lisa Schipper and Dana Fisher, and a couple of journalists about this issue and hope you’ll check it out when you have time. Here’s a core moment with Schipper, a researcher long focused on societal factors that boost or reduce climate vulnerability.
Here’s the rest (viewing links and background): “Covering Climate Where Data are Scant and Beliefs Run Hot.”
Program note: On Tuesday, March 5th, at 2 p.m. ET, join me to explore what’s known about climate activists’ impacts on climate policy, from fossil-fueled backlash to the role of a “radical flank” in building mainstream attention.
My guest is Dana Fisher, a movement-focused sociologist who directs the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity at American University and is the author, most recently, of Saving Ourselves – From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.
Also read Fisher’s recent Nature commentary (with two coauthors): “How effective are climate protests at swaying policy — and what could make a difference?”
Join us on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube (paste your preferred link in your calendar now):
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Through most of my journalism career, I presumed that more information leads to better choices. As media moved online, I experimented ever more with conveying what I was reporting or learning using far more than the written word.
When I went to the North Pole in 2003, I brought back video that captured the unnerving dynamics and sounds of floating, drifting sea ice far better than words could. At climate negotiations in 2005 in Montreal, I tried out podcasting, recording the passionate voices of youth activists as a way to get beyond the gray-suited wonkiness of these sessions. I cobbled graphics on my Dot Earth blog and highlighted other brilliant work there and on my Sustain What webcast, like the carbon visualizations of Adam Nieman.
But what works?
From 2006 on I spent ever more time talking to behavioral scientists about paths from communicating environmental risk to susatainable societal change - and the answers were uniformly disquieting, ranging from “we don’t know” downward to sobering realities like “cultural cognition” (our hunan habit of seeing the same data through divergent cultural filters).
Here’s one such conversation, with Sabine Pahl of the University of Vienna. Pahl has focused for many years on whether and how visual information changes behavior related to environmental challenges and choices. Her work shows that visuals can matter. The results of one early study that caught my attention are here, showing that when infrared images revealing heat leaking from homes are included in flyers on weatherization, homeowners are more apt to invest in improvements.
The study is "Making Heat Visible: Promoting Energy Conservation Behaviors Through Thermal Imaging." Here's a related report: "Exploring the Use of Thermal Imagery for the Promotion of Residential Energy Efficiency.”
I recorded this conversation a couple of years ago, but never aired it. Pahl’s insights and ideas remain as fresh as ever.
Please share this post with others. I’ve set it up to stream on the Sustain What webcast as well, so you can share it with friends or colleagues on Facebook or LinkedIn.
I also encourage you to click back to watch a Sustain What episode from one year ago on a Boston University project visualizing energy trends and dynamics for climate and sustainability impact. I spoke with Cutler Cleveland, project founder and director, and Heather Clifford, the chief data scientist. That show included James Henry, a representative from MyHEAT.ca, a Canadian firm using visual information to drive energy savings and solar adoption.
Also watch and share my 2021 webcast on the “warming stripes” of British climlate scientist Ed Hawkins: “Exploring Climate Visualization Frontiers on #ShareYourStripes Day”
The stripes have gotten heaps of attention (I’ve discussed some of this before), but Ph.D. candidate Ulrike Hahn, who participated in the webcast, wrote a paper showing how little is known about whether such artwork matters.
It’s important not to be swept away by the coolness factor with communication innovation. But it’s also vital to keep pushing communication frontiers.
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Here’s a parting shot from our my journey as a lecturer on a Lindblad/National Geographic cruise to Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands (see my recent post):




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I recently ran a fascinating Sustain What webcast on one of those tangled questions that are all too common in this globalizing world of consumption and extraction: how to manage growing harvests of massive blooms of the crustaceans called krill that are also fodder for reviving populations of great whales (among other wildlife).
Listen above and share this post or do the same on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter to engage wider audiences. Also explore the rough transcript above if you can’t listen.
Krill, extraordinarily abundant in waters around Antarctica, are rich in omega-3 fatty acids that are the basis for a booming and heavily-hyped diet-supplement business and are also increasingly ending up in the manufactured meal fed to farm-raided salmon in place of ocean-caught fish.
Big ships that amount to floating factories began seining krill around that frozen continent many decades ago, led in the early days by the Soviet Union and now by Norway, with China a rising force of course. The latest report from the international Commission for the Conservation of Living Antarctic Marine Resources shows the Soviet boom and bust and the current growth:
My guests come at this issue from varied vantage points:
Joshua Goodman is a talented Miami-based Associated Press reporter who, with colleague David Keyton, led a powerful globe-spanning reporting effort on Antarctic krill, including two weeks at sea last March on a vessel operated by Sea Shepherd Global - essentially the only way to get out on the remote waters where the netting is taking place. Please explore their multimedia package. Here’s a video component:
Conor Ryan is a zoologist who splits his time between academia, conservation, education and wildlife guiding. He was on a small Lindblad cruise ship in January 2021 that came across an astonishing aggregation of fin whales - the second largest whale species - and krill seining vessels. The moment vividly illustrated the problem we discussed. He was a lead author on a paper summarizing the observations:
Commercial krill fishing within a foraging supergroup of fin whales in the Southern Ocean Ecology 104 (4), e4002
Here’s some of the video recorded that day, showing the spouting breaths of the whales with the ships in the distance - all drawn by the same krill abundance:
Nicole Bransome works on Pew’s Protecting Antarctica’s Southern Ocean project, which focuses on conserving an area that encompasses 10% of the world’s ocean through the creation of a network of large-scale marine protected areas (MPAs) around Antarctica. She wrote a recent report that is a fantastic summary of international efforts to manage this resurgent industry. Here’s a Pew video on the role of krill in the Antarctic “carbon conveyer belt”:
Aker BioMarine, the Norwegian company leading the growth in krill netting, was uanble to provide a guest for the live show (it was my fault; I’d changed the recording date and didn’t leave enough time to get them on). But they sent these talking points, several of which we address in the conversation:
* The Antarctic krill fishery is recognized globally as one of the best managed in the world.  It consists of a small number of vessels that catch less than 1% of the total biomass of krill.  
* The fishery is closely managed, monitored, and regulated by CCAMLR and the krill industry works closely with stakeholders to provide and share monitoring data to CCAMLR in support of the organization’s work to strengthen krill management.
* CCAMLR has had a committee of scientists working on krill for more than 40 years. It is by now well documented that krill is among the largest unexploited marine resource in the world, that the current krill fishery is one of the most precautionary in catches relative to stock size and that whale populations currently are increasing by up to 150%, none of which indicates that fishery poses a threat to the Antarctic ecosystem.  
* This fishery is not expe